Dissenting academy libraries and their readers, 1720-1860

The dissenting academy libraries project forms a crucial part of the research for a major new multi-authored 'History of the Dissenting Academies in the British Isles, 1660-1860', to be edited by Isabel Rivers (Queen Mary, University of London) and David Wykes (Dr Williams's Library), together with Knud Haakonssen and Richard Whatmore (University of Sussex). The book will be published by Cambridge University Press, provisionally in 2013, with supporting materials online. The editors will draw on a team of established and younger scholars in the fields of religious, intellectual, political, social, and literary history. Despite considerable interest in the subject, seen particularly in work by political and literary historians, most recent studies rely on three out-of-date books published between fifty and almost a hundred years ago. Some important specialist work has been published in the last thirty years, but there has been no recent general history of the academies.
The earliest dissenting academies were established as a result of the 1662 Act of Uniformity, and were intended to provide Protestant students dissenting from the Church of England with a higher education similar to that at Oxford and Cambridge, from which they were largely excluded. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the rival traditions of evangelical dissent (Congregationalist and Baptist) and rational dissent (Presbyterian and Unitarian) established their own academies. Their main purpose was to prepare candidates for the ministry, but some educated lay students as well. In the mid nineteenth century the academies' original purpose to provide a higher education was largely superseded by the founding of London and the provincial universities, which were open to dissenters, and by the reform of Oxford and Cambridge.
The specific aim of this new project is to analyse and compare the libraries of the principal Congregational, Presbyterian, and Baptist academies, and in particular the use of the books by the students. Despite the wealth of surviving sources (archives, books, catalogues, loan registers, student essays and lecture notes) held at Dr Williams's Library, London, Harris Manchester College, Oxford, and Bristol Baptist College, these dissenting academy libraries have been surprisingly little studied. The project will address questions about the availability and use of books, methods of teaching and learning, the inculcation of traditional ideas, and the encouragement of original thought. What did students actually read? What was the relationship between taught courses and independent study? What was the role of the academies in training leading dissenting thinkers, in both religious and secular subjects? What part did academies play in maintaining orthodoxy or in encouraging heterodoxy amongst their students? The application to the Religion and Society Youth Call is for funding for two postdoctoral research assistants for two years and a technical assistant for one year to collect and analyse data and to write up the results. The outcomes will be the online publication with free access on the Dr Williams's Centre website of detailed data about the libraries, and the print publication of important chapters on libraries and their readers and on methods of teaching and learning in 'A History of the Dissenting Academies'.
The project will make available for the first time accurate and detailed information about the higher education of dissenting youth during the period when Protestant dissent in England was subject to and later freed from legal restrictions. It will show the religious and intellectual diversity of the academies of different denominations, and will thus provide a comparative historical perspective for modern studies of education among religious minorities. The findings will be important for historians of the book and of reading as well as for educationalists, and for local historians and church members beyond the HE sector.