About
Rationale
The bulk of Richard Baxter’s surviving correspondence dates from the 1650s when the English Commonwealth experimented with republican government, followed by the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell and, briefly, his son Richard. The relative political and religious freedom enjoyed by Puritans, like Baxter, during the 1650s meant that he was able to write freely to a diverse range of people with minimal censorship. The letters here are a small sample of the breadth and nature of his epistolary and social networks.
Editorial Methodology
All contractions (other than Mr or Dr) have been silently expanded. Archaic uses of i and u have been replaced by j and v. Original lineation has not been retained. In all other respects the transcriptions aim to reflect the orthography of the early modern correspondents. Please note that this transcription policy has been employed to make the letters as accessible as possible for this exhibition, and is distinct from the editorial guidelines that will be used in The Correspondence of Richard Baxter (9 vols) forthcoming with Oxford University Press.
Scholarly Activity
Two major projects are underway treating respectively Baxter's Correspondence and Treatises.
Richard Baxter's correspondence is one of the most significant collections of letters in seventeenth-century Britain. There are approximately 1,300 letters written between 1638 and 1691, revealing the range both of Baxter's network and of the contribution he made to the intellectual and religious life of seventeenth-century Britain, Europe, and North America. Most of the manuscripts are held at Dr Williams's Library. An editorial project led by Johanna Harris and Alison Searle will produce a comprehensive critical edition of Baxter's correspondence in nine volumes, to be published by Oxford University Press (2018–2022).
The Treatises are the manuscript source for Richard Baxter's autobiography, the Reliquiae Baxterianae. An AHRC funded project led by Professor Neil Keeble seeks to supply provide for the first time a fully annotated and reliable scholarly edition of the Reliquiae Baxterianae text, enabling Baxter’s first-hand account to take its proper place beside those of such better-known (and better-served) witnesses as Burnet, Clarendon, Evelyn, and Pepys. The edition will be published in five volumes by Oxford University Press in 2018.
Partners
Dr Williams's Library is a major research library which specializes in the history of Protestant nonconformity. Its collections include about 300,000 titles from the earliest years of printing to the present, and many thousands of manuscripts from the thirteenth to the twenty-first century. Although the Library’s strengths are in Protestant nonconformity, its collections include printed works and manuscripts of national and even international significance over a range of literary and religious subjects. It holds Richard Baxter's archive comprising his correspondence and treatises and one of the fullest collections of seventeenth-century copies of Baxter's published works.
Cultures of Knowledge: Networking the Republic of Letters, 1550–1750 is a digital research project based in Oxford which is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. At the heart of the project lies the early modern correspondence union catalogue Early Modern Letters Online [EMLO], a collaborative, scholarly, open-source, and freely available database which has emerged over the course of the past five years as the central repository for metadata on scholarly correspondence in early modern Europe. EMLO acts in part as a finding-aid to provide shelfmarks or printed copy details for each letter in the catalogue, as well as directing its users to external databases worldwide where a full catalogue entry, often with an edited transcription and a digital images of the manuscript letter itself, may be consulted.
Oxford University Press [OUP] is a department of the University of Oxford. With an exceptionally diverse programme, it furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. OUP will be the publisher of the nine-volume critical edition of correspondence to arise from the Baxter editorial project (forthcoming 2018–2022); this edition will be made available also on Oxford Scholarly Editions Online [OSEO].
Acknowledgements
Manuscript transcriptions and biographical profiles were provided by Johanna Harris and Alison Searle as part of their ongoing work on The Correspondence of Richard Baxter (forthcoming with Oxford University Press).
This project is supported by the Trustees of Dr Williams’s Library. Gavin Clarke (Archivist) and Jane Giscombe (Conservator) at Dr Williams’s Library supplied images, metadata and curatorial support. Unless otherwise stated all images are copyright of Dr Williams’s Library. To contact the Library regarding reuse see below.
Building the website was supervised by Arno Bosse with additional editorial revisions by Miranda Lewis. Web development and customization work for the site was undertaken by Matthew Wilcoxson. The site's theme is based on an original design by Monica Messaggi Kaya for Early Modern Letters Online.
Contact
Please see The Correspondence of Richard Baxter for further details or email RichardBaxter400@gmail.com. For access to Dr Williams’s Library see dwl.ac.uk or email archives@dwl.ac.uk.