Thomas Morgan of Minety

We are VERY grateful to our guest blogger, Dunstan Roberts, who has written this post for the Old Library blog. Dunstan is a graduate student at Trinity Hall. He has recently submitted a doctoral thesis on readers’ annotations in sixteenth-century religious books.

“A Detection of the Deuils Sophistrie”, a little-known work of sixteenth-century religious controversy, was published in 1546. The colourfully-named polemic was written by the then Master of Trinity Hall and Bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner (c.1495-1555), whose scholarly prowess and political nous placed him at the forefront of the conservative faction during much of the English Reformation.

What makes the College’s copy interesting is that one of its early readers has filled its margins with annotations—about three-thousand words of them, to be precise. Early modern readers often annotated books in order to improve comprehension and recollection, sometimes adding concise paraphrases and non-verbal notes.

But the annotations in the college’s copy of A Detection are not like this. They are far more pugnacious: a full-blown assault on Stephen Gardiner’s text, denouncing its theology, challenging its arguments, and refuting its patristic sources with rival interpretations and occasionally with rival sources.

Stephen Gardiner, A Detection of the Deuils Sophistrie (1546). Trinity Hall, TH.G.I.1, sigs E3V-E4R.

In more detail:

Sigs E3V-E4R: “In this prayer ys heresye where he said christe moth[er] brought forth god wiche hath no begy[n]ninge note also his treason for images”.

An analysis of the theological viewpoint of the annotations reveals a reader opposed to Gardiner’s Catholicism, but without any suggestion of religious radicalism: in short, a moderate Protestant.

So who was responsible for these unusual annotations? We are fortunate in this instance that the annotator has made his identity explicit through an ownership inscription at the rear of the book: ‘Tho[mas] morgan[us] Ap[u]d Myntie Diocaes[is]. Sa[rum]’. This gives us both a person and a location. The village of Minety (to give it its modern spelling) lies on the border between Wiltshire and Gloucestershire, about 7 miles north-west of Swindon, and falls within the diocese of Salisbury (known in Latin as Sarum). As for Thomas Morgan, he was vicar of Minety from 1582 to 1627, an impressive innings, especially by early-modern standards. We can find two students of his name at Oxford (none at Cambridge) during the decade prior to his installation at Minety: one at Jesus College and one at New Inn Hall (a medieval institution later subsumed into Balliol College). One of these men is very likely our man.

Sig. T4R (detail): “Tho[mas] morgan[us] Ap[u]d Myntie Diocaes[is] Sa[rum]” (Thomas Morgan of Minety, Salisbury Diocese).

Thomas Morgan received his intellectual training at a time when university-educated clergy were seen as critical to the consolidation of the Elizabethan Religious Settlement and were highly sought after. Several colleges in Oxford and Cambridge (including Jesus College, Oxford, Morgan’s possible alma mater) were founded specifically to satisfy this demand. The theological education which the universities provided was conducted along explicitly disputatious lines; prospective clergy were taught how to debate and persuade, which sources to cite and what arguments to employ. Morgan’s patristic sources continued to be taught, even once their purely theological significance to Protestants had started to wane because they were useful for debating with Catholics. The members of this ‘new model clergy’ were not retained within centres of scholarship, but were dispatched into the provinces, where they could have a real impact.

It is within these historical circumstances which we should view this volume and its unusual contents. Whilst it is difficult to fathom the exact purpose of the annotations, there are several likely explanations. Combative annotations like this were sometimes used in the preparation of published rejoinders to controversial texts, although there is no specific evidence to suggest that Morgan was planning anything along these lines. He might, however, have been planning something slightly lower key, such as a sermon in which the former Bishop of Winchester was to be attacked. Or his motives might have been more private, attacking the text as an intellectual exercise, training himself for the larger fight against Catholicism.

There are many questions which remain unanswered and which will merit investigation in the future. We do not know what happened to the book during the centuries before the college acquired it in the latter half of the twentieth century. Nor, significantly, do we know how and why this volume survived when so many other sixteenth-century books perished. These details would be valuable in drawing together the complicated events to which this volume suggestively alludes. But we are, in the meantime, blessed with a remarkably vivid picture of the disputatious religious reading practices which came to the fore during the protracted years of religious turmoil in sixteenth century England.

Images by Dunstan Roberts.

The entirely bearable lightness of Butler

The best way I can think of to describe the books I’ve been cataloguing recently is…heavy. That’s in subject matter (we’ve had the concept of truth, civil society and duties, the lives of various esteemed gentlemen of years gone by, some moral philosophy, and a particularly unusual book on grammar which explicated certain grammatical rules through the medium of verse and, in doing so, was about as successful as it would be for me to espouse the same grammatical rules via the medium of interpretive dance).  But they’ve also been really heavy books.  They weigh an actual ton.  Well, probably not an actual ton. But you catch my drift.  And so, when a slim (ish), light (ish) volume presented itself as the next-on-the-list-to-be-catalogued, joy was unconfined.

…what the books are not as light as

The book is Joseph Butler’s The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, published by Knapton in 1736.  Time for some vital statistics: it’s 320 pages, it weighs in at less than a bag of sugar, and subsequently meets the key criteria that I’d already decided on for the subject of the next blog post.  And yes, I know these are shoddy criteria.  But leaving that to one side, and starting in the traditional way, here’s a picture of the man of the moment:

Handsome fellow

Joseph Butler was born in 1692 in Wantage (then Berkshire, now Oxfordshire), and studied at Oriel College, Oxford.  He was a religious philosopher who, among other things, locked horns with Thomas Hobbes (the philosopher, not the tiger) and John Locke (the philosopher, not the character from LOST), took a highly defensive stance against any contemporaries who argued against traditional systems of morality and religion, and allegedly had words with John Wesley (the founder of Methodism, not anyone else you might know with this name) over his license to preach and the behaviour of his followers.  Quite a CV.  Not much is known about his early life, and it seems that he didn’t really come to prominence until he published his Analogy, which I’ve got in front of me now, in 1736.  He was ordained, so it’s likely that he had parishes, and at one stage he gained the favour of Queen Caroline, the wife of King George II, so he must have been fairly well known, or at least well regarded.  What else?  Well, he became the Bishop of Bristol in about 1740.  The see of Bristol was pretty poor, so it wasn’t exactly the best gig–and the Internet has it that Butler kicked up a bit of a fuss about this appointment.  No less than a decade later he was transferred–promoted, I suppose–to Durham, which was as rich as Bristol was poor.  Butler was Bishop there for about two years before promptly dropping dead in 1752.  Which wasn’t great timing.

Good excuse to use a nice photo though

So he was a theologian, eh? Horace Walpole, the Earl of Orford and the owner of a quite superlative name, described Butler’s theology thus: it is “wafted in a cloud of metaphysics” (IEP), he said, which is really rather lovely.  I’ve got no idea what it means, but it sounds marvellous.  As a graduate of theology (though having never knowingly studied Butler), I decided to at least try to talk about Butler’s theology which will either a) go well or, more likely, b) go wrong, and therefore serve as a timely reminder as to why I gave up theology to become a librarian in the first place.

Well, wouldn’t you?

Here goes.  Butler’s basic understanding–and this underpins the Analogy as well as the rest of his work–naturalises morality and religion. For Butler, they’re just extensions of the common way of life, of nature, and of human nature, and of the world itself.  He uses human nature as an analogy: it’s hierarchically ordered, with conscience right at the very top.  Conscience adapts us to nature, and because conscience deals in issues of virtue and vice, it becomes impossible to divorce nature from morality.  So, if you dismiss morality (and by extension, religion–Christianity, I presume–which Butler perceives as the source of morality), you dismiss the world and your own nature.  Phew.  From this position, Butler draws up many refutations against the ideas of some sceptics, including a branch of Deism espoused by Matthew Tindal which denies, in a roundabout way, revelation through miracles, and he also develops some solutions to the doctrine of necessity and the problem of evil.  He was clearly quite the thinker.

Thinking about his dinner…?

Trinity Hall’s copy of the Analogy is pretty unremarkable, though it’s certainly an early copy.  Unfortunately there’s no discernable provenance, and few signs that it was ever actually read, no marginalia, nothing really that makes this copy stand out as unique.  Which is a pity, as it’d be good to end this blog post with something that’d draw everything together.  But in the words of Butler himself, though admittedly not from the Analogy (thank you Professor Internet), every thing is what it is and not another thing.  Oooh, heavy stuff.

References: IEP, mainly, and then a bit of Wikipedia as well.

Image credits: Feathers, from Joe Shlabotnik; Butler, from IEP and Royal Berkshire History; time, from Toni VC; gorgeous library, from Presurfer. Many thanks to all!

Don’t judge a book by its cover; judge it by the engraving of its author

The cataloguing project is going reasonably smoothly, I’m pleased to say!  I’ve been faced with lots of illegible/very faint scribbles in volumes.  They may be an indication of the book’s provenance, or they may just be some scribbles.  It’s a bit of an irrelevance, really, because I can’t tell what they say anyway.  Not even with a magnifying glass and my specs on.  I wish I could though–it might be a bit scandalous!

But one thing I can state with some certainty is that I don’t envy the early 18^th century law scholars at Trinity Hall.  Especially if I had to encounter the countless indexes and lists and dates and facts included in the books I’ve been cataloguing lately.  This morning, then, I was surprised and delighted to open a book which wasn’t just another long series of law digests, a book which not only wasn’t another contender for the insomniac’s Book of the Year award, but was actually really quite interesting.  And not just because of the picture of the chap that wrote it:

Sir Henry Spelman, engraving by R. White.

It’s an impressive beard, you must admit, and I like his hat.

The book in question was The English Works of Sir Henry Spelman. It’s an anthology of Spelman’s works, in two volumes, though bound together in one.  It was only after a good few minutes of hunting for the second volume that I realised this.  Interestingly, most of the works were published posthumously, and these volumes were edited by an unnamed individual (also known as Edmund Gibson).  I wish that knowing this would constitute proof of my missed vocation as a detective, but in fact it was reported by the record on the ESTC at the British Library.  Gibson was also the Bishop of Lincoln at the time when these volumes were published back in 1723.

Spelman seemed like quite an interesting chap.  Again, not just because of the beard.  There’s lots of information about him on the Oxford DNB.  His dates are a bit iffy, but most sources I’ve looked at suggest c. 1564-1641.  He was a Cambridge man, taking his BA from Trinity College at the age of 18, before going to Furnival’s Inn, and then later Lincoln’s Inn, for law.  He didn’t last long though.  Apparently the hard slog required for a career in law wasn’t something that particularly appealed, so he chose a slightly less lucrative path, and undertook to research and study the history and antiquities of the laws of England.  And I can’t say I blame him—to me that sounds far more interesting.  So he was an historian and an antiquarian, and from what I’ve read of his works today, a bit of a theologian as well.

The works included in these volumes, then, aren’t about the laws themselves but are a series of expositions about what underpins the laws, and inevitably that tends to lead Spelman back to the ancient laws (divine, natural and human), to Scripture and to the church fathers (my favourite, St Augustine, is mentioned a good few times, which has endeared Spelman to me even more!)  Even his focus is religious in nature—he seems to be keen on examining the relationship of the law and the church, with the contents of his work revealing emphases on tithes, church property, and the respect due to churches.  Now, I’m pretty sure that there’s nothing revolutionary in what Spelman is saying, but his writing is richly historical and theological in its approach, and impassioned enough to suggest that these are things he genuinely cared about.

I finished cataloguing this book earlier today, and my heart sank a little as I got to the end of checking the MARC21 punctuation.  Not even in the slightest because I enjoy the punctuation, but because I figured that I was heading straight back to the tedium of the dreary old digest.   But no!  Because here is an engraving of the author of the next book I’m going to be cataloguing.  He looks like a fascinating old soul.  Tomorrow might just be looking up.

Sir Matthew Hale, engraving by M. Wright.