Hostname: page-component-7bb8b95d7b-cx56b Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-09-24T20:48:27.805Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Provision of Books for Poor Clergy Parochial Libraries in the British Isles and the North American Colonies, 1680–1720

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

W.M. Jacob
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

For ministers of Word and sacraments in a reformed Church, books were part of their stock-in-trade. By the late seventeenth century books were widely available, and theological books were the staple of the publishing trade. Possession of books distinguished the inventories of deceased clerics whose wills were proved in consistory courts from their lay neighbours, but books were still too expensive for poorer clergy to buy.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 38: The Church and the Book , 2004 , pp. 257 - 267
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2004

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 O’Day, Rosemary, The English Clergy: the Emergence and Consolidation of a Profession, 1558–1642 (Leicester, 1979 Google Scholar).

2 All statistics, unless otherwise stated, are derived from The Parochial Libraries of the Church of England: A Report of a Committee Appointed by the Central Council for the Care of Churches to Investigate the Number and Condition of Parochial Libraries Belonging to the Church of England (1959).

3 Carpenter, Edward, Thomas Tenison: Archbishop of Canterbury, His Life and Times (1948), 10 Google Scholar.

4 Westminster City Archives, St Martin’s in the Fields Vestry Minute Book, 1683–1716.

5 The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. de Beer, E.S., 5 vols (Oxford, 1955), 4:367 Google Scholar.

6 Lambeth Palace Library [hereafter LPL], MS 1708: Catalogue of the Library of Archbishop Tenison.

7 Helen Hixson, Chains of Knowledge: Wimborne Minster Chained Library (nd), no pagination.

8 Quoted in Brenda M. Park, The Bishop White Library of Newark Parish Church (Newark, 1999), no pagination.

9 Miscellany Account of the Diocese of Carlisle, ed. Ferguson, R.S. (Carlisle, 1877), 7 Google Scholar.

10 Diary of Abraham de la Prynne, Surtees Society, 54 (1869), 133.

11 A Chapter in English Church History: being the Minutes of S.P.C.K. 1698–1704, together with an abstract of Correspondents’ Letters, ed. Edmund McClure (1888), 128.

12 SPCK Abstract Letter No 360, 10 Nov. 1701, in BL, MS Harley 7190, fol. 13, quoted in Dudley W.R. Bahlman, The Moral Revolution of 1688 (New Haven, CT, 1957), 73.

13 Parochial Libraries of the Church of England, 103.

14 Publick Spirit: Illustrated in the Life and Designs of the Revd Thomas Bray D.D., late Minister of St Botolph without Aldgate (1746), 10.

15 Laugher, Charles T., Thomas Bray’s Grand Design: Libraries of the Church of England in America 1693–1785, ACRL Publications in Librarianship, 35 (Chicago, 1973), 10 Google Scholar.

16 LPL, Gibson MS 933/36: ‘Means for Raising a fund for purchasing of the aforesaid General and Parochial Libraries’.

17 Laugher, Thomas Bray’s Grand Design, 11.

18 Published as Bibliotheca Pariochialis (1697).

19 Laugher, Thomas Bray’s Grand Design, 19.

20 Ibid., 31.

21 LPL, Gibson MS 941/74, Letter from William Sacheverell.

22 Keble, John, The Life of the Rt Revd Father in God Thomas Wilson, Lord Bishop of Sodor and Man (Oxford, 1863), 148, 251 Google Scholar.

23 LPL, Gibson MS 938/34.

24 Clarke, W.K. Lowther, A History of the SPCK (1959), 103–4 Google Scholar.

25 McCarthy, Muriel, Archbishop Marsh and his Library (Dublin Google Scholar, nd); Tallon, Maura, Church of Ireland Diocesan Libraries (Dublin, 1959 Google Scholar).

26 Clements, Mary, The S.P.C.K. and Wales 1699–1740 (1954), 43 Google Scholar.

27 Jenkins, Geraint H., Literature, Religion and Society in Wales 1660–1730 (Cardiff, 1978), 52 Google Scholar.

28 Correspondence and Minutes of the SPCK Relating to Wales 1600–1740, ed. Clements, Mary (Cardiff, 1952), 267 Google Scholar, 270, 273, 276.

29 Cowie, L.W., Henry Newman: An American in London 1708–1743 (1956), 53–4 Google Scholar.

30 CUL, SPCK Archives, EL1CS/1, pp. 201, 205.

31 Parochial Libraries of the Church of England, 22. The returns were bound in 6 volumes as Notitia Parochialis: LPL, MSS 960–5.

32 For the full text of the Act see Parochial Libraries of the Church of England, 48–50.

33 Correspondence of Bishop Secker, ed. Jenkins, A.P., Oxfordshire Record Society, 57 (1991), 195 Google Scholar.