Wednesday, 31 May 2023

GEMMS Virtual Lecture: Lucy Underwood "Preaching the Counter-Reformation in England"

There is only a week until Lucy Underwood's virtual lecture "Preaching the Counter-Reformation in England" on June 7!

Register today to join us live or receive a link to the recording later.

https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/lucy-underwood-preaching-the-counter-reformation-in-england-tickets-546389905917

Lecture abstract:

"After the accession of Elizabeth I, Catholicism became a prohibited religion in England. Yet, from the 1570s onwards, the project of the ‘English Mission’ was to bring the Catholic Reformation, which in this case may be properly called a ‘Counter-Reformation’, to England. Like proponents of Catholic Reform elsewhere, they knew the value of preaching, but like other Catholic practices, Catholic preaching happened in the shadows, passing unnoticed except when people got caught. It is therefore difficult for historians to trace: we know it happened, but when, where, how often and – crucially – what was preached has been very difficult to know. There has been more scholarly focus on the practices Catholics used to substitute for preaching and sacraments, when access to a priest was dangerous and infrequent – the printed word becoming especially important.

However, sources on Catholic preaching do exist. This lecture will trace those clues, and will examine the texts of Catholic sermons which survive from the century following the Protestant Reformation – some preached in English Catholic institutions in exile, others, it seems, in England itself. What missionary priests preached, and what English Catholics heard from them, are key to understanding how the Counter Reformation helped to create Catholic communities which could survive in Protestant England."




Monday, 8 May 2023

GEMMS Virtual Lecture: Mary Morrissey "Sermons in series and fragments" 11 May 2023

There is only three days until Mary Morrissey's virtual lecture: "Sermons in series and in fragments: GEMMS, the archive, and finding the Spital and Rehearsal sermons"!

Register today to attend live or to watch the recording later:


Mary will be discussing the annual Spital and Rehearsal sermons preached at St Mary's Spital and St Paul's Cross. She will consider the particular challenges in recovering textual witnesses to these sermons and in classifying and interpreting them.
Mary will particularly highlight how databases likes GEMMS can help with these challenges.


This is the first in a series of lectures hosting by GEMMS in the spring and fall of 2023. Here is the list of our upcoming lectures.



Tuesday, 13 September 2022

Job Opportunity: Research Assistant in the UK

The Gateway to Early Modern Manuscript Sermons (GEMMS) project is seeking a student enrolled in a UK PhD program in a related field of study (including but not limited to early modern English literature, social, political, and religious history, theology, and book history) to assist with data collection. The duration of the position is twelve months, with a 3-month probationary period. There is a possibility of extending the contract. The researcher will work approximately 20 hours per month during the term of the contract, though the number of hours is negotiable with the principal researchers.

GEMMS is a group-sourced, online, bibliographic database of early modern (1530-1715) sermon manuscripts in the UK and North America (https://gemmsorig.usask.ca/). The role of the Research Assistant is primarily to collect metadata for the database in selected UK repositories identified by the principal researchers. The Research Assistant also may have the opportunity to present research, to participate in promoting GEMMS, and to conduct workshops for groups of potential contributors and users.


 Duties:

Collect metadata on sermon manuscripts at libraries and archives in the UK (repositories to be selected in consultation with the principal researchers) and enter this data into the database.

Advise principal researchers of difficulties encountered and significant discoveries of additional materials.

Check and correct data currently in the database.

Contribute to GEMMS’s social media, including short posts and blogs, to highlight the content of GEMMS.

 

Compensation:

The Research Assistant will be compensated £17.50/hour to a maximum of £4200 plus travel expenses as required. In consultation with the principal researchers, the student will develop a mutually beneficial research schedule.

 

Qualifications:

Candidates must be enrolled in a PhD program in a related field at a UK university. Candidates whose work involves the use of early modern British sermons and/or who have a background in early modern British ecclesiastical history will be preferred.

Candidates also must be willing to travel within the UK to conduct research and potentially internationally to attend conferences.

Candidates must be able to communicate effectively both orally and in writing and must be able to work well independently.

Candidates must have accurate word processing skills and be attentive to detail. Familiarity with databases is an asset.

Candidates with training in early modern British paleography will be preferred. Some knowledge of Latin and/or Greek would be useful, though not required.

 

Application procedure:

Applications will be accepted until November 4, 2022. We anticipate hiring to be completed in November and work to begin in January 2023, though an earlier start date may be possible.

Please submit a cover letter outlining your qualifications and availability, a current CV, and the names and contact details for two referees to jeanne.shami@uregina.ca or anne.james@uregina.ca.

Job Opportunity: Research Assistant in the US

The Gateway to Early Modern Manuscript Sermons (GEMMS) project is seeking a student enrolled in an American PhD program in a related field of study (including but not limited to early modern English literature, social, political, and religious history, theology, and book history) to assist with data collection. The duration of the position is twelve months, with a 3-month probationary period. There is a possibility of extending the contract. The researcher will work approximately 20 hours per month during the term of the contract, though the number of hours is negotiable with the principal researchers.

GEMMS is a group-sourced, online, bibliographic database of early modern (1530-1715) sermon manuscripts in the UK and North America (https://gemmsorig.usask.ca/). The role of the Research Assistant is primarily to collect metadata for the database in selected US repositories, primarily in the northeast, identified by the principal researchers. The Research Assistant also may have the opportunity to present research, to participate in promoting GEMMS, and to conduct workshops for groups of potential contributors and users.

 

Duties:

Collect metadata on sermon manuscripts at libraries and archives in the US (repositories to be selected in consultation with the principal researchers) and enter this data into the database.

Advise principal researchers of difficulties encountered and significant discoveries of additional materials.

Check and correct data currently in the database.

Contribute to GEMMS’s social media, including short posts and blogs, to highlight the content of GEMMS.

 

Compensation:

The Research Assistant will be compensated $21 USD/hour to a maximum of $5040 plus travel expenses as required. In consultation with the principal researchers, the student will develop a mutually beneficial research schedule.

 

Qualifications:

Candidates must be enrolled in a PhD program in a related field at an American university. Candidates should live in or near New Haven, CT; or Boston (including Cambridge), MA.

Candidates will be preferred if their work involves the use of early modern British or colonial sermons and/or they have a background in early modern British or colonial ecclesiastical history.

Candidates must also be willing to travel within the Eastern US to conduct research and potentially internationally to attend conferences.

Candidates must be able to communicate effectively both orally and in writing and must be able to work well independently.

Candidates must have accurate word processing skills and be attentive to detail. Familiarity with databases is an asset.

Candidates with training in early modern paleography will be preferred. Some knowledge of Latin and/or Greek would be useful, though not required.

 

Application procedure:

Applications will be accepted until November 4, 2022. We anticipate hiring to be completed in November and work to begin in January 2023, though an earlier start date may be possible.

 Please submit a cover letter outlining your qualifications and availability, a current CV, and the names and contact details for two referees to jeanne.shami@uregina.ca or anne.james@uregina.ca.

Wednesday, 25 May 2022

‘My Doubts and scruples in Religion’: The Recantation of John Gibbs in the GEMMS Database (GEMMS Sermon #25000)

 

But ’tis no matter, let what will, befall,

                               A Recantation Sermon payes for all.[1]


Sermon#25000 in the GEMMS database is a recantation sermon delivered by John Gibbs, rector of Gissing, Suffolk, on 2 December 1688 at his own church. This entry represents an extremely rare example of a full transcription of a recantation sermon in manuscript dating from the post-Restoration period.[2] This blogpost considers briefly this significant genre of sermon before discussing Gibbs and the circumstances surrounding his recantation.

Recantation sermons were prevalent in 1530–1715, the period covered by the GEMMS project.[3] If a preacher had been tried and convicted of heresy, he was required to recant and to make a public penance, frequently reading a confession at the event and sometimes delivering a sermon. On some occasions, the sermon would be preached by another clergyman in the presence of the guilty party. In the early years of the Reformation, refusal to recant would often result in execution by burning (see Figure 1).[4] Recantation sermons therefore constitute valuable sources for scholars researching religio-political censorship, the activities of wayward clergy, and the consequences of heresy in the long English Reformation.

 

Figure 1: ‘The death and burning of the most constant Martyrs of Christ, Doctor Robert Barns, Thomas Garret, and William Hierome, in Smithfield, an. 1541.’ From John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments
(exact edition unknown). British Museum, 1880,1113.4120.

Within the GEMMS database, there are three examples of inflammatory sermons which caused their authors to be condemned and subsequently to recant.[5] However, full handwritten transcriptions of recantation sermons appear to be scarce. This is somewhat surprising as recantation sermons could prove extremely popular in print; Mary Morrissey notes that Theophilus Higgons’s recantation sermon, preached at Paul’s Cross on 3 March 1611, ‘went through three editions in the year of its delivery, something that few sermons achieved’.[6]

Dating from a somewhat later period than Higgons’s sermon, one full transcription of a recantation sermon within the GEMMS database can be found within the commonplace book of William Lloyd, bishop of Norwich (British Library, Add MS 40160 / GEMMS-MANUSCRIPT-001583). Lloyd was later to be deprived himself, on account of being a nonjuror, on 1 February 1690.[7] The scribe has not been identified; however, at the top of the first page of the sermon transcription, a title has been provided in Lloyd’s own hand: ‘Mr Gibbs his recantation sermon preached by my order att his parish church att Gissing’ (see Figure 2).[8]

 

Figure 2: The first page of John Gibbs’ recantation sermon. British Library, Add MS 40160, f. 49r.


‘Mr Gibbs of Gissing’ was John Gibbs, who was admitted pensioner at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge in 1660, graduating B.A. in 1663/4 and proceeding M.A. in 1667. From 1668 until 1690, he was rector of Gissing, Norfolk; in 1671, he also became rector of Banham, Norfolk.[9] According to Francis Blomefield, he had been presented to Gissing by King Charles II and was ejected, like Lloyd, as a nonjuror in 1690. Moreover, he was ‘an odd but harmless man, both in life and conversation’. After his ejection, he lived in the north porch chamber at the church at Gissing, positioning his bed in order that he could see the altar; when he died, he was buried at Frenze, Norfolk.[10] In his short account of Gibbs, Blomefield fails to mention one crucial detail; namely, that Gibbs had apparently considered converting to Catholicism in 1687 before returning to the Church of England.[11]

Gibbs’s temptation to convert must be understood within the religio-political setting of the late 1680s. The position of the High Church, led by bishops such as William Lloyd, was becoming increasingly undermined by the Catholic James II.[12] However, the question of whether Gibbs was directly motivated to join the Catholic Church owing to James II’s Catholicism and its impact upon the clergy is difficult to answer without concrete evidence.[13] The events leading up to Gibbs’ recantation remain obscure; it is not certain whether Gibbs confessed to Lloyd himself or if Lloyd had received information about Gibbs from another source. Furthermore, the exact timing of Lloyd’s condemnation and order for Gibbs’s recantation is nebulous; we cannot be sure whether Lloyd had to wait for some time before he was able to carry out his censure of Gibbs. James II eventually fled England for France at the end of December 1688, arriving on Christmas Day. Gibbs’s recantation sermon was preached, in any case, at an opportune moment, a time when the fall of James was imminent.

Within the commonplace book, the recantation sermon is preceded by a list of John Gibbs’s ‘Considerations moveing to the Church of Rome with Answers thereunto’.[14] There are seven principal reasons why Catholicism appealed to Gibbs; to provide just a couple of examples, he argued that ‘Protestants seem to imitate ancient Hereticks seeking Religion in the way of Science and reason, to the Contempt of Church Authority.’ Besides, the invocation of Saints was ‘a splendid, and magnificent way of worshipping of God’.[15]

The biblical text for Gibbs’ recantation sermon, chosen by Lloyd, was an extract from Luke 22:32 (‘[…] and when thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren’).[16] Gibbs opened his sermon by referring to Peter as ‘a Great instance of humane frailty, and Infirmity in thrice denying his Lord and Master’. He proposed in the first instance to speak of Peter’s ‘State and Condition before his Fall’, his Fall itself, and of his repentance and conversion.[17] Referring to Peter’s denial of Christ, Gibbs argued that one of the causes of his Fall was ‘his Pride and Confidence of himselfe, and in the power of his own will’; what is more, ‘[h]is faith was not strong enough, nor his contempt of the world great enough’. Gibbs posited that Peter’s Fall was ‘not a Totall Apostacy’, but rather ‘a timerous Negation of the Faith’.[18] Once the sermon had drawn to a close, Gibbs continued by admitting that he had been ‘makeing Adventures in Religion, to find out the safest way to Heaven’. ‘One great mistake in this Adventure’ was his lack of communication with William Lloyd regarding his ‘Doubts and scruples in Religion’; his transgressions may otherwise have been thwarted. He proceeded to denounce ‘the Pompe and Ceremony’ of Catholicism with its ‘great inconvenience of haveing all performed in an unknown tongue’, concluding that he had erroneously admired ‘the things of Strangers, to the prejudice of those of his own Country’.[19] The names of ten churchwardens, witnesses to the sermon, follow this statement.

John Gibbs was swiftly forgiven. A letter from William Lloyd, addressed to William Sancroft, archbishop of Canterbury, and dated 4 December 1688, describes Lloyd’s impression of Gibbs as a ‘melancholy pious man’ (see Figure 3).[20] Tantalisingly, Lloyd’s letter also outlines his reaction to Gibbs’s recantation sermon, which was apparently satisfactory to the extent that he recommended its publication. Whether Sancroft approved of Lloyd’s suggestion to publish the sermon is not known; there are no surviving records relating to the sermon’s publication.[21]

 

Figure 3: Letter from William Lloyd to Archbishop William Sancroft, 4 December 1688. Bodleian Library, MS. Tanner 28, fol. 274.

Recantation sermons continued to be preached later in the period and beyond until 1779 when the genre ceased, and many of these were never published.[22] It remains to be seen whether further manuscript witnesses, or reports, of these fascinating sermons dating from the years 1530 until 1715 will be uncovered as the GEMMS Team resume on-site visits to archives in 2022.

 

References

[1] Anonymous, [A] Pulpit To Be [Let] (London, 1665). English Broadside Ballad Archive, EBBA 36352.

[2] For the scarcity of extant recantation sermons in manuscript dating from post-Restoration England, see Simon Lewis, ‘“The Scum of Controversy”: Recantation Sermons in the Churches of England and Ireland, 1673–1779’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 55.2 (2022), 215–33 (p. 216).

[3] Early modern recantation sermons, particularly those preached in the late seventeenth century, have received comparatively little scholarly attention. See Michael C. Questier, ‘English Clerical Converts to Protestantism 1580–1596’, Recusant History, 20.4 (1991), 455–77 (pp. 470–71); Susan Wabuda, ‘Equivocation and Recantation During the English Reformation: The ‘Subtle Shadows’ of Dr Edward Crome’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 44.2 (1993), 224–42; Michael C. Questier, Conversion, Politics and Religion in England, 1580–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), ch. 6; Mary Morrissey, Politics and the Paul’s Cross Sermons, 1558–1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 113–20; Kate Roddy, ‘Recasting Recantation in 1540s England: Thomas Becon, Robert Wisdom, and Robert Crowley’, Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme, 39.1 (2016), 63–90. Note that Morrissey focuses on recantation sermons principally preached by clergy converting from Catholicism until the 1640s, while Kate Roddy conducts close readings of recantation texts from the early years of the English Reformation.

 [4] Wabuda, pp. 226–27.

 [5] The three controversial sermons were preached by Samuel Harsnett at Paul’s Cross in 1584; Thomas Lushington at St Mary’s, Oxford, on 29 March 1624 (Easter Monday); and Richard Spinke on 19 May 1632, also at Oxford. Witnesses of Harsnett’s sermon appear in Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. th. e. 57 (GEMMS-MANUSCRIPT-001472) and Bodleian Library, MS. Rawlinson D 1349 (GEMMS-MANUSCRIPT-000145). Lushington’s sermon appears in Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. th. f. 14 (GEMMS-MANUSCRIPT-001469), Bodleian Library, MS. Rawlinson E 21 (GEMMS-MANUSCRIPT-000133) and Bodleian Library, MS. Rawlinson E 95 (GEMMS-MANUSCRIPT-000135). There are three witnesses of Spinke’s sermon: Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. th. e. 57 (appearing directly before Harsnett’s sermon); Bodleian Library, MS. Rawlinson E. 148 (GEMMS-MANUSCRIPT-000523); Trinity College Dublin, MS 232 (GEMMS-MANUSCRIPT-001076). For Harsnett’s anti-Calvinist sermon, see Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c. 1590–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 164, 252–53. See Frank L. Huntley for the notoriety of Lushington’s sermon (‘Dr. Thomas Lushington (1590–1661), Sir Thomas Browne’s Oxford Tutor’, Modern Philology, 81.1 (1983), 14–23). For Spinke’s sermon, see Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought 1600–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 71; Jeanne Shami, ‘The Love-sick Spouse: John Stoughton’s 1624 Paul’s Cross Sermon in Context’, in Paul’s Cross and the Culture of Persuasion in England, 1520–1640, ed. by Torrance Kirby and P. G. Stanwood (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2014), pp. 389–409. 

[6] Theophilus Higgons, A Sermon Preached at Pauls Crosse the third of March, 1610 (London, 1611); Morrissey, p. 118. See also Alec Ryrie, The Gospel and Henry VIII: Evangelicals in the Early English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 82; Lewis, p. 216.

[7] Stuart Handley, ‘Lloyd, William (1636/7–1710)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn (2004), <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/16859> [accessed 3 March 2022]. For a summary of the contents of Lloyd’s commonplace book up to f. 171v, see Peter Smith, ‘Bishop William Lloyd of Norwich and his Commonplace Book’, Norfolk Archaeology, 44.4 (2005), 702–11.

[8] British Library, Add MS 40160 (GEMMS-MANUSCRIPT-001583; GEMMS-SERMON-025000), f. 49r.

[9] Joseph Foster, Alumni Oxonienses: The Members of the University of Oxford, 1500–1714, 4 vols (Oxford: Parker, 1891), Vol. II, p. 561; John Venn and J. A. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses, Part I, 4 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922–27), Vol. II, p. 209. See also John Gibbs (CCEd Person ID 12516)The Clergy of the Church of England Database 1540–1835 <http://www.theclergydatabase.org.uk> [accessed 4 February 2022].

[10] Francis Blomefield, ‘Hundred of Diss: Gissing’, in An Essay Towards A Topographical History of the County of Norfolk: Volume 1 (London, 1805), pp. 162–81. British History Online, <http://www.british-history.ac.uk/topographical-hist-norfolk/vol1/pp162-181> [accessed 4 February 2022]. For Gibbs’ ejection, see also ‘A Catalogue of the English Clergie and other Schollars, who haue refused to take the New Oaths’, British Library, Add MS 40160, ff. 74r–78r (f. 74r).

[11] Letter from William Lloyd to Archbishop William Sancroft, 14 November 1688, Bodleian Library, MS. Tanner 28, fol. 248.

[12] John Spurr, The Restoration Church of England, 1646–1689 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1991), ch. 2; Smith, p. 706.

[13] For the promotion of Catholicism in Jacobite sermons, see William Gibson, ‘Engines of Tyranny: The Court Sermons of James II’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 97.1 (2021), 11–24.

[14] British Library, Add MS 40160, ff. 45r–46r.

[15] British Library, Add MS 40160, f. 45r.

[16] Letter from William Lloyd to Archbishop William Sancroft, 4 December 1688, Bodleian Library, MS. Tanner 28, fol. 274 (GEMMS-REPORT-000378).

[17] British Library, Add MS 40160, f. 49r.

[18] British Library, Add MS 40160, f. 49v.

[19] British Library, Add MS 40160, f. 52r.

[20] Smith, p. 706.

[21] Letter from William Lloyd to Archbishop William Sancroft, 4 December 1688, Bodleian Library, MS. Tanner 28, fol. 274.

[22] Lewis, p. 216.

 

~ Hannah Yip


Wednesday, 6 October 2021

Free Virtual Event: GEMMS Roundtable on Digital Collections of Sermons

Please join us next week on Friday, Oct. 15 at 2 pm EDT, when members of the GEMMS team (Mary Morrissey, Brent Nelson, Jeanne Shami, Jennifer Farooq and Hannah Yip) will be participating in a virtual roundtable on Digital Collections of Sermons for the 2021 Sermon Studies Conference. Attendance is free. If you aren't able to join us live, a recording will be available for all registered participants.

Along with reflecting on the development and future of GEMMS, we will be using our experience with GEMMS to discuss how the use of digital sermon collections has contributed to Sermon Studies, how researchers might use such collections to open up new avenues of scholarship in the future, and how to make digital collections more sustainable.

You also may be interested in Hannah Yip's presentation on early modern sermons: "Manuscript Sermons in the Twenty-First Century and Beyond" on Oct. 16 at 10:30 am EDT as part of the Publishing Sermons session.

To register, visit:

Monday, 18 January 2021

The Department of Rare Books (and Twitter): Another Source for Early Modern Manuscript Sermons

Six years ago, William Sherman, pioneer of early modern marginalia studies, and Heather Wolfe, Curator of Manuscripts and Archivist at the Folger Shakespeare Library, lamented in a joint article published in the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies that not only are manuscripts and printed books treated as distinct categories, but it is also necessary to examine them in separate rooms in the Cambridge University Library.[1] Sherman and Wolfe argued that for scholars such as themselves, looking at manuscript notes in printed books, or studying authors whose written legacy is divided between published and unpublished texts, such an arrangement is impractical. They find themselves ‘dreaming of a special reading room […] devoted to books that sit somewhere between script and print […] for scholars working at the interface between the oral and the written’.[2]

Scholars of early modern sermons certainly fall into this category of researchers examining the relationship between oral and written culture, and this blogpost centres on the discovery of manuscript sermons within printed books which are not listed in manuscript catalogues. While previous GEMMS blogposts have concentrated principally upon the content of intriguing sermons catalogued in our database and the prominent figures who created these texts and owned these manuscripts, this contribution joins a growing literature which scrutinises the book-historical and material aspects of early modern sermons.[3] Indeed, in the current scholarship focusing on early modern English manuscript sermons, printed books have seldom been cited as a potential place in which they can be found.[4] It will also be argued that, in an unprecedented time which has necessitated an increasing reliance on virtual collaboration, Twitter is a medium via which more of these rare printed books containing manuscript sermons can be shared and subsequently studied.

Investigation of these particular sermons prompts important questions regarding the cataloguing of rare books and manuscripts. Should manuscripts bound with printed books be provided with a shelfmark reflecting its scribal status, as is the case with an exquisite manuscript witness of the First Book of Official Homilies, bound with a partial copy of Sternhold and Hopkins’ Psalms, or a compilation of late seventeenth-century sermon notes by a minister based in Buckinghamshire, similarly attached to a 1638 edition of the same work?[5] Alternatively, if found within a substantial collection of printed material, should the manuscript work be given a ‘printed books’ shelfmark?


Figure 1: ‘A Sermon Preached att ye Funerall of Ms Lee, att Threekingham, Aprill ye 4. Anno Dom. i682’. British Library, General Reference Collection C.175.i.16.(4).

Moreover, how do we find manuscripts if they are hidden away within rare printed books? Such discoveries may be entirely serendipitous. In July 2018, when ordering up a printed sermon for my own research, I found two handwritten funeral sermons dating from the 1680s, in addition to other manuscript material within this unassuming octavo Sammelband, which were uncatalogued on the British Library Main Catalogue.[6] These items were also not discoverable on the Manuscripts Catalogue. The two sermons represent significant contributions to our source bank of sermons preached in the parishes and for women. The first sermon, delivered at the funeral of a Ms Lee (d. 1682) in Threekingham, Lincolnshire, can be linked to a monumental slab in the middle aisle of Threekingham Church, and may therefore be of value to genealogists and local historians studying this particular village (see Figure 1).[7] The second text is a rare example of a surviving manuscript sermon by theologian and nonjuring clergyman Richard Brocklesby (1634/5–1714), also based in Lincolnshire, remembered today for a monumental theological treatise of over 1,000 pages concerning the Trinity (see Figure 2).[8]


Figure 2: ‘A Sermon Preached att ye Funerall of our Deceased Friend, and Neighbour, Mr Longlands, att Walcott; By Mr. Brocklesby, January the 30. 1684/5’. British Library, General Reference Collection C.175.i.16.(5).


These two sermons, along with the other manuscripts within this volume, were recently added to the British Library Main Catalogue, but not the Manuscripts Catalogue. Under ‘Physical Description’, the cataloguers have added a note stating that the sermons are ‘manuscript’ and ‘manuscript (transcript, handwritten)’, respectively. By using these specific search terms in the British Library Main Catalogue, I was able to find several manuscripts which would otherwise have been overlooked, and which are all available for consultation in the ‘Rare Books and Music’ reading room only. One full transcript of a printed sermon by John Tillotson (1630–1694) appears within a volume of theological tracts and treatises all published in the years 1687–1689.[9] Most interestingly, the scribe of the sermon has identified ‘C: Alston’ as the licenser of this sermon, whereas only the initials are specified on the title page of the printed copy (see Figure 3).[10] Therefore, this manuscript witness is not only suggestive of Tillotson’s wide-ranging influence in print, but also connects the text with Charles Alston (d. 1714), a prebendary of St Paul’s who licensed texts on behalf of his ecclesiastical patron, Henry Compton, Bishop of London (1631/2–1713), and is of potential interest to researchers studying ecclesiastical press censorship after the Restoration.


Figure 3: Manuscript witness of a printed sermon by John Tillotson. British Library, General Reference Collection 222.e.5.(9).

While these examples illustrate the possibility for unearthing manuscripts within Sammelbände which comprise miscellaneous material, it is important to note that manuscript sermons can also appear as companion pieces to the printed works with which they are bound. A manuscript witness of a printed sermon by John King (d. 1621), bound with other published sermons by the bishop, adopts the specific mise-en-page as the printed texts, indicating the aesthetic sensibilities of the anonymous scribe.[11] An anonymous manuscript sermon commemorating Charles I, entitled ‘In nomine Crucifixi’ and dated 1648, is bound in a copy of the Eikon Basilike. It is conjectured by Helen W. Randall that this presentation volume, stamped with a royal crest and a death’s head, was intended as a gift for Charles II.[12] However, it was not necessarily the case that such companion pieces were always written with a view for presentation. In a folio volume of sermons by Jeremy Taylor (bap. 1613, d. 1667), the last, uncatalogued item is a plain transcription of Taylor’s sermon preached at the funeral of the Royalist, Sir George Dalston (c. 1581–1657).[13] All of these items exhibit the varied contexts in which manuscript sermons could complement, and co-exist with, printed material.

Moreover, it is not only full sermons which are discoverable alongside printed texts, but also sermon notes and reports, which can be found either interleaved or as marginalia within printed books. Three Bibles, held at the Bodleian Library and categorised as part of the Rawlinson Manuscripts collection, are interspersed with manuscript sermon notes dating from the second half of the seventeenth century. All three contain valuable documentations of sermons preached at funerals and occasions such as the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot.[14] Looking ahead to an even later period, Katherine Acheson gives a detailed analysis of the so-called Newby Bible held at the Folger Shakespeare Library, in which it is possible to uncover a woman’s experience of the world of Methodism in the late eighteenth century.[15] Within the Bible, there are over 600 annotations made by one Elizabeth Boggis (fl. 1780s), recording the dates of each sermon, the speakers, the biblical texts and occasionally the locations in which the sermons were delivered.

In addition to Bibles, copies of printed sermons could also carry substantial marginal annotations providing details of preached texts. Opposite the title page in a folio volume of sermons by John Frost (1625/6–1656), pastor of St Olave, Hart Street, London, John Rippon records a sermon on Exodus 17:7 delivered by ‘Mr Evins’ at ‘the Association at Prescott’ in 1746 (see Figure 4).[16] The most likely candidate for ‘Mr Evins’ is Hugh Evans (c. 1713–1781), a Particular Baptist minister connected with Bristol Baptist Academy. The genealogical notes within the volume indicate that ‘John Rippon’ was the grandfather of John Rippon (1751–1836), who published the first Baptist hymnbook to gain widespread acceptance in England.[17] As the scrawled notes on the title page indicate, this copy of Frost’s sermons was kept within this Baptist dynasty. Further research may expose the extent to which Baptists consumed the teachings of Church of England clergymen which had been published almost a century beforehand. Although the reports within the Newby Bible and the Frost sermons fall outside the remit of the GEMMS database as they date from the mid-1700s and beyond, all of these specimens pave the way for yet more discoveries of earlier sermon reports which can subsequently be catalogued.[18]


Figure 4: Eighteenth-century sermon report in Henry E. Huntington Library, Call # 432609.

And it is towards Twitter that we might turn for help. Sjoerd Levelt has shown us the ways in which Twitter creates and solidifies a community of scholarly sharing, in the manner of ‘a virtual chat at the coffee machine’.[19] After a Tweet about my aforementioned discovery at the British Library was published, Anna-Lujz Gilbert informed the GEMMS team about an incunable which originally formed part of the parish library at Marlborough, Wiltshire. According to the Bodleian Library SOLO Catalogue, this rare incunable, which appears to be represented in only three libraries in Britain and Ireland, is bound in Oxford blind-tooled calf dating from c. 1570 and features thirty-nine leaves of manuscript sermons in Latin and English, written in a single sixteenth-century secretary hand.[20]

To revisit Sherman and Wolfe’s article in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, scholars of early modern literature and history find themselves dreaming, in fact, of any reading room whatsoever, grateful for any opportunity to handle rare books and manuscripts, however they are catalogued. For much of the past year, the GEMMS team has had to work remotely, cataloguing sermons from digitised manuscripts; for example, making use of the Cambridge Digital Library Scriptorium, in addition to lesser-known sources for digitised manuscripts such as the Wellcome Library in London. One of the primary objectives of GEMMS is to foster an online community of sermon scholars with our open access, group-sourced bibliographic database, supplemented with our presence on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. With the rise of remote working, the GEMMS database has the potential to serve a greater range and number of researchers than previously imagined, as scholars are required to become more and more efficient when choosing which items to order up to reading rooms within extremely restricted timeframes. Virtually, we remain open to suggestions, discoveries and discussions regarding early modern manuscript sermons and sermon reports, whether found in printed books as full texts or as marginal annotations, and would welcome further opinions on their categorisation within the libraries and archives which are, at present, inaccessible to us.


References

[1] William Sherman and Heather Wolfe, ‘The Department of Hybrid Books: Thomas Milles between Manuscript and Print’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 45.3 (2015), 457–85.

[2] Sherman and Wolfe, ‘The Department of Hybrid Books’, p. 457.

[3] Catherine Evans, ‘Early Modern Sermons and Annotations’, <https://sites.manchester.ac.uk/jrri-blog/2020/08/07/early-modern-sermons-and-annotations/> [accessed 27 December 2020].

[4] See, for example, Ian M. Green, Continuity and Change in Protestant Preaching in Early Modern England (London: Dr Williams’s Trust, 2009).

[5] See Christ Church Library, University of Oxford, MS 150 (GEMMS-MANUSCRIPT-001340); William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, MS.1952.004 (GEMMS-MANUSCRIPT-001308). See also Hannibal Hamlin, ‘“Very Mete to be Used of All Sortes of People”: The Remarkable Popularity of the “Sternhold and Hopkins” Psalter’, The Yale University Library Gazette, 75.1/2 (2000), 37–51.

[6] British Library, General Reference Collection C.175.i.16 (GEMMS-MANUSCRIPT-000880, <https://gemms.itercommunity.org/view_record.php?table=manuscript&id=880[accessed 11 January 2021]).

[7] W. A. Cragg, A History of Threekingham with Stow, in Lincolnshire (Sleaford: W. K. Morton & Sons, 1913), p. 105.

[8] Richard Brocklesby, An Explication of the Gospel-Theism and the Divinity of the Christian Religion (London, 1706).

[9] British Library, General Reference Collection 222.e.5.(9) (GEMMS-MANUSCRIPT-001285, <https://gemms.itercommunity.org/view_record.php?table=manuscript&id=1285[accessed 11 January 2021]).

[10] John Tillotson, The Indispensable Necessity of the Knowledge of the Holy Scripture, &c. (London, 1687).

[11] British Library, General Reference Collection 4476.bb.98.(2) (GEMMS-MANUSCRIPT-001284, <https://gemms.itercommunity.org/view_record.php?table=manuscript&id=1284[accessed 11 January 2021]).

[12] Henry E. Huntington Library, Call # 102338 (GEMMS-MANUSCRIPT-001198, <https://gemms.itercommunity.org/view_record.php?table=manuscript&id=1198[accessed 11 January 2021]); Helen W. Randall, ‘The Rise and Fall of a Martyrology: Sermons on Charles I’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 10.2 (1947), 135–67 (p. 141 n. 5).

[13] British Library, General Reference Collection 479.e.6.(3.) (GEMMS-MANUSCRIPT-001286, <https://gemms.itercommunity.org/view_record.php?table=manuscript&id=1286> [accessed 11 January 2021]). This manuscript is described in the Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450–1700 (CELM), <https://celm-ms.org.uk/repositories/british-library-rare-books.html> [accessed 28 December 2020]. The sermon was first published individually as J[eremy]. T[aylor]., A Sermon Preached at the Funerall of that worthy Knight Sr. George Dalston, &c. (London, 1658).

[14] Bodleian Library, MS. Rawl. C. 1 (GEMMS-MANUSCRIPT-000468, <https://gemms.itercommunity.org/view_record.php?table=manuscript&id=468[accessed 11 January 2021]); MS. Rawl. C. 2 (GEMMS-MANUSCRIPT-000333, <https://gemms.itercommunity.org/view_record.php?table=manuscript&id=333[accessed 11 January 2021]); MS. Rawl. C. 3 (GEMMS-MANUSCRIPT-000334, <https://gemms.itercommunity.org/view_record.php?table=manuscript&id=334[accessed 11 January 2021]).

[15] Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 2129; Katherine Acheson, ‘The Occupation of the Margins: Writing, Space, and Early Modern Women’, in Early Modern English Marginalia, ed. by Katherine Acheson (Abingdon and New York, NY: Routledge, 2019), pp. 70–89 (pp. 80–82). See also Peter Stallybrass, ‘Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible’, in Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies, ed. by Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer (Pennsylvania, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), pp. 42–79 (pp. 61–63).

[16] John Frost, Select Sermons Preached upon special occasions, &c. (Cambridge, 1658) (Henry E. Huntington Library, Call # 432609).

[17] Ken R. Manley, ‘Rippon, John (1751–1836)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn (2008), <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/23666> [accessed 27 December 2020].

[18] As a teenager, John Winthrop the Younger (1606–1676), future Governor of Massachusetts, made notes of sermons preached in Suffolk, England, in his copy of a 1620 almanac by Richard Allestree (d. 1643). See Karl Josef Höltgen, ‘Two Francis Quarleses: The Emblem Poet and the Suffolk Parson’, English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700, 7 (1998), 131–61 (p. 154); Richard Calis and others, ‘Passing the Book: Cultures of Reading in the Winthrop Family, 1580–1730’, Past & Present, 241.1 (2018), 69–141 (p. 86).

[19] Sjoerd Levelt, ‘Early Modern Marginalia and #earlymoderntwitter’, in Early Modern English Marginalia, ed. by Katherine Acheson (Abingdon and New York, NY: Routledge, 2019), pp. 234–56 (p. 239).

[20] Pope Gregory, Incipit prefatio Gregorii pape in omeliis super ezechielem prophetam (Paris: Georg Wolf, [c. 1489–91]). See also National Library of Scotland, Inc.252.3; Marsh’s Library, Dublin, <https://www.marshlibrary.ie/catalogue/Record/13930> [accessed 23 December 2020]. I have not investigated its representation in other parts of the world. We are grateful to Anna-Lujz Gilbert, PhD candidate at the University of Exeter, for drawing our attention to this incunable via Twitter.

~ Hannah Yip


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