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Tanner on Nicholas Owen: A Note

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 October 2016

Extract

Allan Fea, Secret Chambers and Hiding-Places (1901, 1904, 1908), pp. 20-21, quotes Mathias Tanner, Societas Iesu Militans … sive … Vita et Mors … (Prague, 1675), p. 75 (should be p. 73), as saying that Nicholas Owen ‘with incomparable skill knew how to conduct priests to a place of safety along subterranean passages, to hide them between walls and bury them in impenetrable recesses, and to entangle them in labyrinths and a thousand windings’. But, although there are reasons for supposing that Owen may have converted the medieval sewer at Baddesley Clinton into a hiding-place, Fea and others who have followed him are incautious in quoting the first part of this sentence at its face value. Tanner's Latin is reminiscent of Aeneid V, 588-591, and should perhaps be taken rather as an elegant tribute to a craftsman worthy to be compared with Daedalus:

Ut quondam Creta fertur Labyrinthus in alta parietibus textum caecis iter ancipitemque mile viis habuisse dolum, qua signa sequendi frangeret indeprensus et inremeabilis error.

The labyrinth of subterranean Crete: A legend for evasion and deceit; Where blind partitions wove a baffling maze, And sly devices turned a thousand ways.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Catholic Record Society 1980

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References

Notes

1 Recusant History 12, pp. 174-84.

2 The translation is my own.

3 John Gerard: The Autobiography of an Elizabethan, ed. Caraman (1956), pp. 148–9, 158-60.Google Scholar