A 600-year-old book that once belonged to a personal attendant of King Henry VIII is helping to reveal the shifting allegiances and religious ferment that captured the Tudor court, shaping world history along the way.
The book in question is a copy of Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, a religious tract that was translated and adapted from Latin early in the 15th century by a monk named Nicholas Love. It was a “medieval bestseller,” says James Wade of the University of Cambridge: owning a copy signaled you were a pious Catholic. The book stresses the importance of the sacraments and other orthodoxy, such as oral confession to a priest and the transubstantiation of Christ’s body and blood when taking communion.
“It was a hugely popular work of English prose in the 15th century, and the reason it’s so important is because it’s right on the fulcrum of orthodox and heterodox belief,” Wade says. “It becomes a lightning rod for judging whether someone is a heretic or not.”
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Enter John Gage, an aristocrat who served Henry VIII. Among Gage’s jobs at Henry’s court was taking stock of monasteries and either turning their possessions over to the Crown or destroying them, as the king sought to both increase his wealth and assert himself as leader of the Church of England.
Gage himself was a devout Catholic. So when he came across a copy of Mirror, he didn’t destroy it. At the time, owners would sign their books—they were pricey pieces of property—and as evidenced by his signature, Gage decided to keep this one for himself. It remained in his family’s possession until 1976, when a distant descendant sold the book at auction to Japanese professor and rare book collector Toshiyuki Takamiya. When Takamiya gave his book collection to Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Mirrors was included, and it was later digitized.
But the manuscript was incomplete. Now six missing pages, which touched on Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, have been found.
It’s not entirely clear how the lost pages got separated from the rest of the book. What is known is that the stitches that bound the pages came loose at some point and that the pages were left out when the book was mended.
The loose leaves ended up in a collection of Gage family estate records and passed through several sets of hands before they ended up at an archive called the Keep based in Brighton, England. No one there realized exactly what they had in their possession—a missing piece of important British history essentially hiding in plain sight—until Wade and Katie Walter of the University of Sussex started to suspect the two texts had originally been one.
In a new study published in Notes and Queries, Walter and Wade describe how they compared the dimensions of both documents, as well as the style and color of the annotations and headers on the pages, and found the two were identical.
“It was known that these pages existed, but they weren’t cataloged accurately,” Wade says. “We identified what the six pages were. And then, once we realized what they were and the book that they came from…, we started looking to extant manuscripts of the mirror to match it up, and we found the match.”
While the missing pages have been found, it is unclear if they will ever join the rest of the manuscript. This is not a matter of repairing a library book that the dog got into because the pages themselves are an invaluable historical artifact.
“All those decisions are above my pay grade, but I’m pretty sure that, no, they won’t be reconnected,” Wade. “But it’s useful to reconstruct medieval objects. Yes, this book is incomplete, but now you know where to find what’s missing.”
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