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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

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
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).

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7 Helen Hixson, Chains of Knowledge: Wimborne Minster Chained Library (nd), 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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