12 December 2009

SSPP

(This carries on from my recent post on the S Thomas's High Altar.)

There can be no doubt that all right-thinking people regard Fr Jeremy Hummerstone, Vicar of the small Devon town of Torrington, as not only a good thing but a very good thing. He is the epitome of the old-style Anglican Catholic Parish Priest: literate, well-read, acute, and with a laugh never far away. Merton College Oxford was the stable that trained him (and Somerville College produced Clarissa: happy days, when Clergy Wives were good quality girls). I was fortunate enough to get to know him when, during my short six years in Devon, we were members of the clerical society for Catholic Anglicans in the diocese of Exeter, the Society of S Boniface (Mass; exegesis of the Greek NT; lunch; Paper; chat. It is still going strong and still blessed with the sempiternal Fr Michael Moreton). The months we went to Torrington afforded the opportunity, in Torrington church, of praying before the shrine of our Lady of Czenstochowa.

Fr Jeremy has kindly shown me a copy of what I take to be* the elusive first Edition of the English Missal, published with the date 1912 by W Knott, Brooke Street, Holborn. And bound into that volume - in between Holy Saturday and the Ordinary of the Mass - is a quite different volume published the same year, The Music of the Mass, published by the SSPP. The insertion, unlike the rest of the Knott Missal, is in the characteristically and sumptuously Baroque style of SSPP - woodcuts; borders; large print. It is not just the sung bits of the Mass with the chants, but a collection of the1549 rite, the Asperges, the Nuptial Mass, the 1662 rite (with, in what looks to me rather like a joke, under "Canon of the Mass" Dr Cranmer's Prayer of Humble Access interpolated with the rubrics from the Tridentine Missal that go with Te igitur). At the start of the missal, inserted just before the Knott's title page, an additional frontispiece reads just "Missal", with a badge for the SSPP (curiously, not their usual one).

In other words, SSPP piggybacked their material onto the Knott Missal. And the designs embossed on the front and back covers are from the Music (which I last met in Lancing Chapel's Sacristy). I wonder what the relationship was between SSPP and Knott.

Has anybody else come across anything like this?

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*Unlike all other English Missals, it doesn't say which edition it is. So that means it must be the first?

2 comments:

Little Black Sambo said...

Pooh went into a corner of the room and said proudly to himself, "... That sort of Bear."

Unknown said...
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