Fasciculus Rerum Expetendarum et Fugiendarum

Here’s a new book which came up on Google Books recently and I’ve added to the Primary Source Bibliography: the Fasciculus Rerum Expetendarum et Fugiendarum, as compiled by Edward Brown and published in London in 1690. I’ve seen older volumes like this one appear on Google over the past year or so.

What Brown did was to re-print a 1535 compilation by Ortuinus (or Ortwin) Gratius (1475-1542). Gratius’ compilation is in volume 1, and Brown compiled Volume 2 as an “appendix.” According to Gratius’ entry in the Catholic Encyclopedia, this work “is a collection of sixty-six more or less weighty treatises of various authors on ecclesiastical and profane history, dogma and canon law, compiled to expose the noxious elements in the Church’s organism, and prepare a way for a future council to remedy them.” He seems to be have been a pretty bookish scholar, not very suited to public controversies in which he found himself involved.

In any event, his compilation includes documents about a range of church controversies. The first three documents in Gratius’s volume, for instance, concern Martin V, Eugenius IV, and the 1435 Council of Basle. He then jumps ahead to deal with Leo X and the Reformation, and then all the way back to 11th century and Gregory VIII (formerly Hildebrand), and then even further back to Silvester II. Most of the documents in the volume, however, are from the 15th and 16th centuries, including especially William Woodforde’s condemnation of 18 points in Wyclif’s Trialogus (item 21) and material about Wycliffites and Hussites from the Council of Constance, including the documents which officially deemed Wyclif a heretic (items 22-26). One can see why Gratius was appealing to sixteenth-century protestant writers: Foxe used some of his material.

Vol. 2, the Appendix, also includes material from the 11th through 15th centuries, including more material about Hus and Wyclif (items 51-56), the schism (item 48) and a copy of Fitzralph’s Defensorium Curatorum (item 44).