A Scholarly Edition of Richard Baxters Reliquiae Baxterianae

AHRC Research Grant

September 2011-August 2014

Professor John Coffey

Richard Baxter’s 800-page folio Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696) is an unrivalled primary source for early modern historical, ecclesiastical, cultural and literary studies. Its first-hand account of events from the 1620s to the 1680s is both a strikingly original autobiographical work of personal reflection and insight, and a powerful apologia in defence of Baxter’s moderate Puritan churchmanship. Its contribution to the literary struggle of the 1690s for the master historical narrative of the seventeenth century shaped Puritan memory and passed on to the eighteenth century a significant Baxterian tradition of nonconformist ecclesiology and theology.

This grant forms part of the funding towards a large project which aims to prepare a fully annotated five-volume scholarly edition, commissioned by Oxford University Press, on Richard Baxter’s Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696). The grant is led by the University of Stirling and is strongly supported by the Trustees of Dr Williams’s Library, which holds much of the extant manuscript, and by the Dr Williams’s Centre for Dissenting Studies. The grant will fund a three-year Postdoctoral Research Fellow and PhD student.

In addition to this grant Professor Coffey has also received funding from the British Academy to further the aims of this project and is currently advertising for an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Studentship with the Dr Williams’s Library for research into the published and unpublished collections of Richard Baxter (1615-91) and Edmund Calamy (1671-1732).

For more information about the overall project, please see the dedicated page at the Dr Williams’s Centre for Dissenting Studies.

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