Life
1588-1657; maternally connected with Peter Lombard; ed. Univ. of Coimbra,
Lisbon, lerning Portuguese, Castilina, and Hebrew; ordination Franciscan,
1613; found money and supplies for Owen Roe O’Neill and influenced
Innocent X in appointment of Rinuccini as papal nuncio to Confederation
of Kilkenny; attacked for Old English views of Ireland; his influence
on the Vatican’s continued so long that Gladstone blamed St. Isidore’s
for its anti-English bias; issued Annales Ordinis Minorum, 8 vols.
(1625-54), his life’s work, is the history of his order; Scriptores
Ordinis Minorum (1650) is a bibliography of the Franciscans; founded
Irish Franciscan College of St. Isidore in Rome, 1625; amassed 5,000 books
in his library there incl. Irish MSS which were removed to Ireland in
1870; inserted the Feast of St. Patrick as a universal feast of the Church
when member of the Breviary reform commission; criticised in the Commentarius
Rinuccinianus (1661-62); there is a portrait in the NGI attrib. to
Jusepe Ribera after Carlo Maratti (who also supplied drawings for engravings).
RR PI DIB DIW FDA OCIL
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Works
ed. [with others], Johannes Duns Scotus, Opera Omnia, 12 vols.
(1637; rep. Hildsheim: Olms 1968-69); Annales Ordinis Minorum: Tomus
Primus, Editio secunda, 7 vols. (Lugduni: Sumpt Claudii Prost, &
I Bapt. Devenet 1647), folio [copy in Marsh’s Library, Stillingfleet
Coll.]; Brendan Jennings, OFM, ed., Wadding Papers 1614-38 (Dublin:
Irish MSS Commission 1953).
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Criticism
Gregory Cleary, Fr. Luke Wadding and St. Isidore’s College, Rome;
Biograhpical and Historical Notes and Documents (Rome 1925), 263pp.
Seamus Deane, ed., Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (1991, Vol. 1) selects extract from Annales Ordinis Minorum [pp.262-63].
Joseph Th. Leerssen, Mere Irish & Fior-Ghael: Studies in the Idea
of Irish Nationality, Its Development and Literary Expression Prior To
The Nineteenth Century (John Benjamins Pub. Co., Amsterdam & Philadelphia,
1986), p. 304.
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Notes
Richard Ryan, Biographia Hibernica, Irish Worthies
(1821), Vol. II, p.616. And note, no DNB entry [Concise], but see
Peter Wadding, infra. See also Ann Stewart, National Portrait
Collection (1986).
R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland (1988), calling him the ‘indirect instigator and director of Irish rebellion, sending officers and arms to the country, 1641 [who] advised Pope to send Rinucinni as nuncio, 1645’ (p.94).
Muriel McCarthy, comp., Hibernia Resurgens [Catalogue of Marsh’s Library Exhibition] (Dublin: Marsh’s Library 1994) [BIOG. and BIBL. as supra.]
‘Time was when we had wooden chalices and golden priests, now we
have golden chalices and wooden priests.’ From Annales Ordinis
Minorum; quoted by Kickham in The Irish People, and requoted
by John O’Leary in Recollections of Fenians and Fenianism (1896).
Yeats’s lines, ‘The glittering eyes in a death’s head/Of old Luke Wadding’s portrait said/Welcome ...’ (‘Demon and Beast’, 1920).
Wadding appears in James Murphy’s in The Flight from the Cliffs (Duffy 1911), a historical romance of Confederation days.
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)