A Note on the Life of St Edmund Gennings

Abstract

It is now not far short of thirty years since, in the pages of the present journal, Antony Allison made his survey of ‘Franciscan Books in English 1559–1640’. In the course of his article he describes the work entitled The Life and Death of Edmund Geninges priest which appeared at St. Omers in 1614. He cited the prime authority of Luke Wadding, the great Franciscan historian, whose Scriptores Ordinis Minorum was published in 1650, that this anonymous account was by the martyr’s brother, John Gennings, who became a Franciscan about 1616, restored the Second Province of the English Friars, and was in fact still alive when Wadding wrote. Further analysing the book, Allison identifies ‘I. G. P’, to whom it is dedicated, as John Gennings Priest, and ‘I. W. P.’ who writes the dedication, as John Wilson Priest, who in 1614 had already for several years been manager of the press operating in the English Jesuit College at St. Omers.