Lambeth Palace Library and the Church of England Record Centre regularly embark on new projects and acquire and catalogue new material, from rare books and manuscripts to modern publications.  Every two months, we post here a brief update on some of our latest acquisitions, projects and upcoming events, to keep you up-to-date with our most recent news.

Library Advent Calendar!

There’s still time to join us on Facebook every morning until Christmas as we open a door of our Library Advent Calendar onto a different Christmas scene from our collections.  Find our Facebook page here or follow the hashtag #LPLAdventCalendar.

This month’s new accessions

Some highlights from our most recent new acquisitions at Lambeth Palace Library include:

• Colour: the art & science of illuminated manuscripts, edited by Stella Panayotova, with the assistance of Deirdre Jackson and Paola Ricciardi (London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2016). More information and reviews available here.
• Durham Cathedral: history, fabric and culture, edited by David Brown (Yale: Yale University Press, 2015). More information and reviews available here.
• In the beginning was the word: the Bible in American public life, 1492-1783, by Mark A. Noll (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). More information and reviews available here.
• John Henry Newman: a portrait in letters, edited by Roderick Strange (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). More information and reviews available here.
• John Whitgift: Elizabeth I’s last Archbishop of Canterbury, by Christopher Barnett (Croydon: The Whitgift Foundation, 2015). More information available here.
• Life conquers death: meditations on the garden, the cross, and the tree of life, by John Arnold (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007). More information and reviews available here.
• The literary culture of the Reformation: grammar and grace, by Brian Cummings (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002). More information and reviews available here.
• Parish church treasures: the nation’s greatest art collection, by John Goodall; with photographs by Paul Barker from Country Life (London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2015). More information available here.
• Postcards on parchment: the social lives of medieval books, by Kathryn M. Rudy (Yale: Yale University Press, 2015). More information and reviews available here.
• Symbols and allegories in art, by Matilde Battistini, translated by Stephen Sartarelli (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005). More information and reviews available here.
• Your will be done: exploring eternal subordination, divine monarchy and divine humility, by Michael J. Ovey (London: The Latimer Trust, 2016). More information available here.

For more regular updates on new accessions to the library, please follow us on Facebook.

News from the Archives

Cataloguing work was completed on the records of the Council on Foreign Relations relating to the Roman Catholic Church from the 1930s to the 1980s, and on the papers of Michael Harper relating to the charismatic movement within the Church of England. The Library acquired, by the gift of its Friends organisation, a manuscript containing religious points and poetry opposing Tractarianism and Romanism, reflecting the contentious atmosphere of the 1850s on these topics (MS 5085). Work to re-catalogue the Library’s historic records continues. For more information on these collections please see the online archives catalogue.

Items from the Library’s collections documenting the relationship between the Serbian Orthodox Church and the Church of England were displayed during the visit of the Patriarch to Lambeth Palace. The papers of John Stott were used by the Rt Revd Dr Graham Kings, Mission Theologian in the Anglican Communion, in a lecture at the Pontifical Urbaniana University on Evangelical-Roman Catholic Dialogue on Mission, 1977-84. Records from the archive of the Incorporated Church Building Society featured in a blog post on the architect Thomas Atkinson.

Church of England Record Centre update

• On 25th November, as a part of Explore your Archive day, we held an open day which was also reported here.
• Gordon Lansdown Barnes collection has been fully catalogued. He was an ecclesiologist, a local historian and an architectural photographer with a national reputation. The collection consists of notebooks with notes on churches and church architecture, papers and MS notes on various Victorian architects (including H. Woodyer), research material on London churches and churches in England, and a huge collection of photographs of church architecture in the UK.
• Corporation of the Church House papers: The Corporation of Church House collection contains materials relating to the formation and operation of the Corporation of Church House between 1798 and 2003. The collection contains written and typed notes, correspondence, newspaper cuttings, reports, minutes books, deeds and leases, photographic materials, books and articles.
  
  

  Archive Open Day at CERC

  

  New Church House (CCH/H/5/2 p.80)

Recently catalogued from the Sion Collection

Highlights among the material recently catalogued from the Sion College Collection (now held at Lambeth Palace Library) include:

1. Scot, Reginald. Scots discovery of witchcraft: proving the common opinions of witches contracting with devils, spirits, or familiars … to be but imaginary … London: E. Cotes, 1654. [C60.6/SCO8] This landmark treatise by Reginald Scot was one of the first to take a more sceptical view towards witches. Scot believed the prosecution of those accused of witchcraft to be an irrational and un-Christian practice. The book also contains some of the first published material on magic, an exposé showing how charlatans used tricks to fool the public.
2. Reynolds, John. The triumphs of Gods revenge against the crying and execrable sinne of murther, London: A. Maxwell, 1670. [K71.4/R33] The volume was once in the collection of the royal printer Thomas James, whose wife, Eleanor James organised a major bequest of his books to Sion College following his death in 1711. Reynold’s work was first published in 1621, however the Sion copy is the fifth edition of the moralistic but sensational stories. Reynolds claimed that his stories were translations from original French accounts, but in fact they were of his own composition. The work includes numerous engravings depicting the vengeance wrought by God on murderous sinners, illustrated in cartoon strip style. The Sion copy is especially notable as it has been printed without one of its engravings, leaving a blank space where the image should have been above the text.
3. Sartorius, Johannes. Paraphrases in omnes prophetas, tam maiores quatuor, quàm minores duodecim, Basel: J. Oporinus, 1558. [A26.20/T63] This paraphrase of the Prophets came to Sion College Library from the extensive collection of Lazarus Seaman, an English clergyman and nonconformist minister. Over his life Seaman amassed a library of more than 5,000 books which was sold at public auction upon his death in 1675, the first time an auction of this kind had been held in England.
4. Twyn, Brian. Antiquitatis Academiae Oxoniensis apologia, Oxford: Joseph Barnes, 1608. [D74.1a/T94] The engraved bookplate of “Mr. Smart Lethieullier of Alldersbrook in Com Essex” was found inside this volume during cataloguing and is the first book discovered so far in the Sion Collection to have belonged to him. Lethieullier (1701-1760) was the High Sheriff of Essex from 1758 and was in fact the son of the Sheriff of London, Sir John Lethieullier (1632/3–1719). Smart was an avid antiquarian who wrote numerous papers on the subject, including the first comprehensive account of the Bayeux Tapestry written in English (1732-3).

K71.4/R33

D74.1a/T94

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