ABSTRACT
In 1968 a Catholic encyclopaedia which had belonged to the Brudenell family of Deane Park, Northamptonshire, was sold by Hofmann and Freeman to the Bodleian Library.1 There are two volumes, uniformly bound in calf, with 836 pages in volume one, 966 pages in volume two. The massive volumes have leaves measuring 280 by 420 mm, and the transcription seems to be in a single secretary hand. Though the transcription dates from 1605 to 1608, the material stretches back twenty-five years to the interrogations surrounding Edmund Campion. There are ruled margins, illuminated capitals, and some decoration from medieval manuscripts (on which the whole is consciously modelled) with over fifty lines to a page. The watermark of the paper is of grapes: mostly an even bunch of grapes with a cross at the top.2
