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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
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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.

Information

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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