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Catholicism and the Church of England in a Northern Library: Henry Halsted and the Burnley Grammar School Library

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2016

Stuart Mews  and
Michael Mullett
Stuart Mews
Affiliation:
Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education University of Lancaster
Michael Mullett
Affiliation:
Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education University of Lancaster
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Extract

THE contents of what was described in 1885 as ‘the most extensive and the most interesting of the old Grammar School Libraries of Lancashire’, the Burnley Grammar School Library, shed interesting light on the state of religious controversy in the north between the late sixteenth and the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The library, which, through the generosity of Burnley Grammar School and with the kind co-operation of the Lancashire County Library, is now on permanent loan at Lancaster University, forms, as presently constituted, a collection of 875 volumes, published mainly in the seventeenth century. It owes its foundation to, and, as we shall see, reflects the religious interests, aims, and viewpoint of, the Revd Henry Halsted (1641-1728), rector of Stansfield, in Suffolk, who left the whole of his personal library to the Burnley Grammar School in 1728. Shortly after Halsted’s death, the collection was augmented by a small addition of books presented by another clergyman, the Revd Edmund Towneley of Rowley, rector of Slaidburn, Lancashire. It is, therefore, essentially a clerical and religious library and provides an interesting example of what sort of material typical, affluent English incumbents of the Augustan and early Hanoverian period considered worthy of places on their study shelves. For purposes of comparison within the region, a collection by two laymen made in another northern town and, like the Halsted-Towneley collection, charitably gifted, the Petyt Library, built up to over two thousand volumes by two brothers in the first decade of the eighteenth century, and now housed within Skipton Public Library, with its heavy emphasis on divinity, can be profitably examined. In the essay that follows we shall consider the Burnley Collection as essentially that of its principal donor, Henry Halsted, and as enshrining his aims.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History Subsidia , Volume 12: Life and Thought in the Northern Church , 1999 , pp. 533 - 547
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1999 

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References

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