THE ONLY decent collection of Robert Southwell’s poetry I am aware of which includes the Latin as well as the English poems is Peter Davidson and Anne Sweeney’s Collected Poems (Carcanet, 2007). Now Peter tells me he will be helping to compile a complete edition of all the Jesuit martyr’s work – poetry and prose. He’s delighted. The plan is for a five-volume set, something like 17 years’ worth of work.

“There’s a lot of unpublished material: letters, devotions, meditations,” Peter tells me. “Even such well known texts as Mary Magdalen’s Funeral Tears have no modern edition of any sort. The verse was edited, very well by contemporary standards, in the 1960s, but without the Latin verse. Few sources are in mainstream research libraries: the two most important manuscripts are at Stonyhurst, but we also have primary sources in Rome, Vienna, Brussels. We’re having to deal with the systematic destruction of manuscripts by the Elizabethan state.”