Henry VIII, the Reign

​Exclusive Collectanea satis copiosa

​“For about two years, a team of scholars and royal agents gathered together and studied manuscripts that would provide evidence to buttress King Henry VIII’s claims that his annulment of marriage to Catherine of Aragon was justified and that his matrimonial case ought to be determined in England rather than Rome.
 
The manuscripts, which included English and Latin chronicles, Anglo-Saxon laws, Roman law and conciliar decrees, were taken from monasteries and deposited in the Royal Library. They fed into a manuscript compilation called the 'Collectanea satis copiosa' (The Sufficiently Abundant Collections) that was presented to Henry in the summer of 1530.
 
The Collectanea argued that the Church of England was an autonomous province of the Catholic Church and that Henry had both secular imperium and spiritual supremacy in England. In other words, it was the King, not the Pope, who exercised supreme jurisdiction within his realm.
 
It is not surprising that Henry was delighted with the work and wrote approving comments all over the manuscript. Now confident that he had right on his side, he began the campaign to persuade or force his clerics to accept and recognise his imperial pretensions.”

from the British Library

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The ​Collectanea satis copiosa

I can’t say I agree with the last paragraph of the above, I think it was Henry who was dragging his feet; otherwise, he would have been divorced and remarried much sooner.
 
Notwithstanding, exclusively to Henry VIII, the Reign these are the first digital images – aside from the single one on the British Library website – ever produced of the Collectanea satis copiosa.
 
In total there are four hundred and forty-six images, most of which show two manuscripts and so there are about eight hundred or so documents that make up the full collection.
 
This slideshow is made up of a dozen taken at random from the collection, which will hopefully make interesting reading – to those who can read them!

There is no translation available of the Latin text into English.

​This collection of documents fed directly into the legislation that led to the severance of papal jurisdiction in England, the Act of Appeals. The Reformation was largely about the influence of Rome in England. There was, of course, eventually, because of the Reformation a translation of the Bible from Latin into English for the ‘common people’ to study.

It is rather ironic, therefore, that the Collectanea satis copiosa, set as the Corner Stone of the Reformation in England and arguably a foundation stone of Anglicanism, remains untranslated from the language of Rome and unavailable for the ‘common people’ to study.
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M.H.

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