Thomas Hervey Bible in Shorthand, 1795

© The Swedenborg Society

This essay should be considered as part of a larger question: how were Continental millenarian, mystic and hermetic texts received and adapted in contexts for which they had not been intended? Its purpose is twofold – specifically to assess the extent of Jacob Boehme’s and Emanuel Swedenborg’s influence by comparing the responses of English-speaking readers to their works. More generally, by focussing on continuities between early modern religious ideas and the Romantic imagination it explores some of the routes through which certain beliefs traversed the Enlightenment. It will suggest that while the evidence for Swedenborg’s detailed knowledge of Boehme and his interpreters is largely inconclusive, these writings nonetheless form an important context for appreciating the initial reception of Swedenborg’s teachings. Mapping this readership also enables us to go beyond the boundaries of traditional Swedenborgian studies which have tended to emphasize denominational developments at the expense of wider contexts.

William Lyon Mackenzie's early life in Scotland has been the subject of little research. This is a thorough study of the hundreds of books he is known to have read between age 10 and 25 before emigrating to Canada. It includes a full bibliography

1999

Vll viii Taneguy Le Fe:vre, were Boubereau's teachers. A prize book given to Boubereau when he was in the Academie has been signed by Amyraut and Le Fevre. Boubereau's library represents a typical scholar's library of the seventeenth century. Religious controversy, history, politics, science, medicine and many of the classical authors are well represented. There are also a considerable number of books relating to the French protestants and the Edict of Nantes. Jean-Paul Pittion, when commenting on Boubereau's Muriel McCarthy xi orientalist William Guise, presented him with books when he was Bishop of Ferns and Leighlin in 1690. " Until recently the only information we had on the use and importance of Marsh's collection came from two sources. The first was in Professor George Stokes's Some Worthies of the Irish Church (London, 1900). Stokes included' An account of Archbishop Marsh and his library', and a brief description of some of the liturgical and oriental books. The second reference was given by Louis Hyman in his book The Jews in Ireland (London/Jerusalem, 1972). Hyman said that 'in the presence of Rev. Dr Thomas Sheridan ... the Rev. John Alexander and other Hebrew scholars (they) held a disputation in the public library of St. Sepulchre's in May 1733'. (Marsh's Library was originally called the Library of St. Sepulchre.) In 1994 Professor Popkin told us that when an Israeli scholar studied a microfilm of our oriental collection he said that it was the biggest list of Latin Judaica he had ever seen or heard of. Because of this new information it may be useful to give some details of the oriental books in our collections.

Southeastern Theological Review, 2021

William Carey serves as a historical example as to why missionaries must have a solid ecclesiological framework before stepping foot on foreign soil. If one of the missionary’s primary tasks—or one might argue the primary task—is to plant churches, then he should know what he believes about the church. Before being sent, Carey showed three aspects of his ecclesiological beliefs in his pastoral oversight of two local churches and as an advocate for the fulfillment of the Great Commission through the cooperation of local churches: he believed the church was (1) missional, (2) logocentric, and (3) didactic. While his beliefs are evident in his groundbreaking missiological work, An Enquiry, much can also be gleaned from Carey’s journal, selected letters, numerous biographies, and other related works. In the following article, in order to defend my position, I will note the transition of Carey as pastor to Carey as both missionary, pastor (still), and indigenous church planter. After introducing Carey as a pastor, I will focus on each subsection of Carey’s threefold mission strategy—(1) evangelism, (2) translation, and (3) education—and how each component is based on Carey’s ecclesiological framework noted above. Carey believed the church was functionally missional and didactic, which led to his immediate focus on evangelism and education. He also believed the church was ontologically logocentric, which led to his ongoing translation of Scripture for the native people.

1988

Manuscript Studies, 2016

Medieval manuscripts are perishable objects. Whether they have degraded over time through constant use and exposure to the elements or been deliberately cut up to be reused in other fashions or sold on the collectors' market, the fragments produced by these destructive circumstances still have much to tell modern scholars about the medieval codices of which they were once a part. Through a series of six case studies focusing on a disparate array of fragments, this essay demonstrates how scholars can use the University of Pennsylvania's Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts to help recover the hidden histories of fragmentary manuscripts.

Teaching Theology and Religion, 2020

This case study leverages existing library assets and curated educational resources for students, pastors, and health ministers by seeking to increase their understandings of how religion intersects with, and informs, health education and promotion, and public health more broadly, while equipping them with tools to engage in important conversations about health ministry. This article describes and evaluates a library-based research guide that is a replicable model for collaborative ministerial training about engaging, evaluating, and participating in health education and promotion, which is a vital component of theological education. Much of the pedagogical conversation around religion and health within theological and religious studies has focused on the ways that religion assists in the socio-cultural construction of health and healing. This case study expands on this conversation by detailing how seminary students, pastors, and health ministers can also use public health knowledge to better provide services to their congregations and communities. This model provides long-term, publicly-available, asynchronous access to these materials, making it a valuable resource for theology schools.

Notes and Records: the Royal Society journal of the history of science, 2015

This note concerns the earliest evidence for Isaac Newton's use of Hebrew: a manuscript copy by Newton of part of a work intended to provide a reader of the Hebrew alphabet with the ability to identify or memorise more than a thousand words and to begin to master the conjugations of the Hebrew verb. In describing the content of this unpublished manuscript and establishing its source and original author for the first time, we will suggest how and when Newton may have initially become acquainted with the language. Finally, basing ourselves in part on an examination of the reading marks that Newton left in the surviving copies of Hebrew grammars and lexicons that he owned, we will argue that his interest in Hebrew was not intended to achieve linguistic proficiency, but remained limited to particular theological queries of singular concern.

The American Historical Review, 1990

Mending and Rebirth: Human Habitats, Reading Communities, and Mentalites, 178o-183o [ Continuity and Change in the Upper Va lley Network of Human Habitats [ Complexity in the Reading Experience: Libraries, Te xts, Interests, and Meanings [ ] Contents [ ix 1 Cultural Life in the Hardscrabble Human Habitat Cultural Life in the Self-Sufficient Fa rmstead Human Habitat Cultural Life in the Self-Sufficient Hamlet Human Habitat Cultural Life in the Fo rtunate Fa rmstead Human Habitat Cultural Life in the Fo rtunate Village Human Habitat Chapter 10 The Dawn of a "Modern Age": Historical Conclusions and Public Policy Implications

Erudition and the Republic of Letters, 2022

By failing to keep up with the praxeological turn of early modern Europeanists in the 1980s, scholarship on colonial America has consistently discounted the historical student. Uninterested in examining the intellectual habits of colonial students, early American historians have had little to say about seventeenth-and eighteenth-century schools beyond rehearsing worn, and often demonstrably false platitudes. This article seeks to take colonial students seriously by examining one of their most common, yet little studied intellectual practices: shorthand. When we apply the focus on intellectual praxis to modest subjects, when we look across boundaries of space and time, placing colonial America back into the fold of early modern history, a different image of the historical student snaps into focus. Rather than negligible rote memorizers, colonial students become active and engaged learners who sought to propagate the latest scribal technologies of their times.

The article deals with the remarkable exegetical works ascribed to St John Chrysostom – the Commentary on the Prophet Isaiah (CPG 4416) partially preserved in Greek, the major part existing in Armenian translation only, and the cycle of six homilies on King Uzziah, ‘In illud: Vidi Dominum’ (Isa. 6:1) (CPG 4417). Although the Greek text of both of them was studied comprehensively by J. Dumortier and their critical edition appeared in the early 1980s, the manuscript tradition of the Oriental versions – Armenian and Syriac, which provide important textual evidence, remains uninvestigated. The article aims to examine the features of Syriac and to some extent of Armenian manuscripts, which have preserved these valuable pieces of patristic thought, and to provide a preliminary solution for some historical and philological puzzles connected with the texts.

In early January of 1882, Dr. Robert Anstruther Goodsir had finally returned home to Edinburgh after more than twenty-nine years. He was described by some in London as a “Lion of the Season” because of his adventurous spirit and love of travel and adventure. Indeed, prior to his return, he had already lived in Australia, New Zealand, and the Fijian Islands, following the disappoint of his two failed search expeditions for his long-lost brother, Harry, who perished in the ill-fated Franklin expedition of 1845. Much had changed since he left Scotland. His brothers, John, Harry, and Archie were dead; his brother, Joseph was admitted to the Royal Edinburgh Asylum for being suicidal and in a diminished mental capacity; and his sister, Jane was elderly and alone. Despite all of these losses and difficulties, Robert did not sit idly by during the last few years of his life. Rather, he continued his writings; took an active interest in the genealogy of his family’s illustrious past; became a member of the Ex Libris Society of Edinburgh; contributed as an exhibitor of his family’s portraits and medical engravings at the Scottish National Portraits Gallery; researched and drew one hundred and seven heraldic drawings containing two hundred and seven blazons for the Edinburgh-based architect, Hippolyte Jean Blanc. As the last of his immediate family, he used his remaining years to their fullest including the generous donation of hundreds of books and a bust of his late brother, the esteemed Professor of Anatomy to the University of Edinburgh. Consequently, this work will concentrate on the last years of Dr. Robert Anstruther Goodsir by one of the last members of this family.