The Lamentation of England

Dominic of the Mother of God — Bl. Dominic Barberi, the Passionist who received Newman into the Church — took the twenty-two verses of the fifth chapter of Lamentations, the Oratio Jeremiae Prophetae, and applied them one by one to England after the Reformation. He wrote it in Italian as Il pianto dell’Inghilterra between 1824 and 1829, and an English translation was printed at Leicester in 1831. It is in three parts: the meditation on the verses, a second part written when the prayer seemed unanswered, and a third written after Catholic Emancipation.

This setting is in two inks. Red carries the apparatus and nothing else — the Latin of Lamentations, the headings, the editorial marks — and black carries the author’s English, so a reader can tell at sight what is his and what is not. Scripture is given in the Douay-Rheims, which is the English of the Vulgate and suits both the date and the register. Every Latin tag quoted in the prose is translated at the foot of the page, at its first occurrence.

It is a working text, not an edition. The witness behind it is a modern transcription rather than a scan of the 1831 book, and it carried some ninety errors. The Latin here has been collated against the Clementine Vulgate and the English against sense; neither has been collated against the 1831 sheet, of which no page image could be obtained. A true collation needs the 1971 facsimile or Newman’s own copy at the Birmingham Oratory. The front matter of the 1831 edition — title page, dedication and the translator’s preface — is absent from the witness and has not been supplied.

Corrections are welcome.