Ronald Knox

Ronald Knox was the son of the Bishop of Manchester and, as Anglican chaplain of Trinity College, Oxford, one of the most admired wits of his generation. He told the story of his conversion in A Spiritual Aeneid, published in 1918. After six years of increasing conviction, he spent a fortnight at the Benedictine Farnborough Abbey, where he was received into the Catholic Church in September 1917.

I have tried to give a dispassionate account of many institutions in this book, but I will not attempt to do the same by Farnborough Abbey: too many poignant associations are bound up with the single fortnight of my stay.Ronald Knox, A Spiritual Aeneid (1918)

The book takes its frame from the Aeneid, the story of an exile seeking a promised home. Writing after his reception, Knox turned that image on himself.

it was not till I became a Catholic that I became conscious of my former homelessness, my exile from the place that was my ownRonald Knox, A Spiritual Aeneid (1918)

Knox was ordained a Catholic priest in 1919 and served for years as Catholic chaplain to the University of Oxford. He later translated the whole Bible into English from the Latin Vulgate — the version that bears his name. He was born in 1888 and died in 1957.