This image is taken from the cover of Shall we go to the Pictures? Some Thoughts about the Cinema and Ourselves, a pamphlet produced for the Mothers' Union by Lilias Edwards around 1955.
The influence of the cinema on society was a recurrent concern for the Mothers' Union. By the 1930s, a ‘Cinema Sub-committee' had been created under the auspices of the Watch and Social Problems Department. The aims of the committee were to give guidance on the content of films to prospective viewers, to discourage the industry from portrayals of immoral behaviour and to stimulate debate on censorship. ‘Cinema Visitors' were dispatched to their local picture house to report on the latest films; their warnings and recommendations being disseminated via the society's journal.
Verdicts such as those on James Bond films (seen to glamorise crime and ‘create incentives to murder, violence and promiscuity') and apprehension regarding depictions of marriage and divorce may suggest an unenthusiastic response to developments in the cinematic world but the society's attitude could be very positive. In fact in the 1930s the Union found itself denouncing not the films but the criticism levelled at them by the general public, which it felt to be exaggerated and founded on inadequate observation. Shall we go to the Pictures? extols the virtues of the medium, which, the author argues, offered opportunities to learn anything from fruit-preservation and surgery to swimming technique and sex education.
The interest of the Mothers' Union in the media was part of the society's wider concern in public morality and a desire to safeguard family life. These aims led the society to work in the fields of education, healthcare and the reduction of poverty on behalf of some of the least fortunate communities worldwide.
June 2009 marks the 500th anniversary of Henry VIII's coronation. Renowned for his defiance of papal authority, his matrimonial trials and considerable stoutness, Henry is seemingly a very familiar historical figure. However the idea that he was also a highly educated and widely read monarch is less well known and sometimes overlooked.
Henry had his marriage to Catherine of Aragon annulled in 1533 on the grounds that she had been the wife of his late brother Arthur. In order to formulate the theological and legal arguments against his first marriage he accumulated a vast library that reflected the burning questions of the day.
Lambeth Palace Library holds Invicta Veritas (1532) by Thomas Abell, which once belonged to the King and is currently on display at the British Library as part of the exhibition, ‘Henry VIII: Man and Monarch'. On the title page, shown here, Henry has written in his distinctive hand, ‘Fundamentum hujus libri vanum est' - the basic premise of the book is worthless. In several places throughout the volume he has made marginal annotations, expressing his disapprobation with the text. He is particularly concerned with Thomas Abell's interpretation of the matter of consanguinity, which is at the heart of the annulment question. It is perhaps unsurprising that Abell, who was also one of Catherine of Aragon's chaplains, was eventually convicted of high treason, hanged, drawn and quartered in 1540.
The King's tendency to make notes in the books he owned indicates that not only did he read the text carefully, he also thought critically and engaged in the arguments that they presented. Therefore the books that filled the royal shelves have the potential to provide us with a more intimate insight into his desires and whims, as well as a deeper understanding of the revolutionary changes in ideas that took place during his reign.
May marks the anniversary of the death of Nicholas Brady, who co-wrote the ‘New Version of the Psalms of David' with Nahum Tate. This image shows the beginning of Psalm 98, exhorting the faithful to Sing to the Lord a new-made song, set to music by J.Z. Triemer for use in the English Church at Amsterdam.
Brady was born into a Protestant family in Bandon, co. Cork, on 28 October 1659. After being educated at schools in Ireland and England, he began his university career at Oxford in 1678, but was sent down in 1682 for reasons that, unfortunately for lovers of scandal, are now unclear. He later graduated MA from Trinity College, Dublin. He was ordained priest in Cork in 1687, and looked set for a quiet career in the Irish Church. However, thanks to his support for the Glorious Revolution of 1688, events soon led him to England. Nicholas Brady became a popular and fashionable London preacher, and remained in England until his death on 20 May 1726.
Brady published large numbers of his sermons, and also produced a play. However, his most enduring work came from his collaboration with the Poet Laureate and ‘improver' of Shakespeare, Nahum Tate. Together, they created a new metrical version of the Psalms better suited to newly-Enlightened taste than the existing ‘Sternhold and Hopkins' Psalter, which had been written in the early days of the reign of Elizabeth I. Tate and Brady, as the ‘New Version' is often known, hit the shelves in 1696, and became a runaway success, leading to more than 300 subsequent editions. It remained in use as the semi-official Anglican hymn book for 150 years until public worship was revolutionized in the Victorian era.
21st April 2009 is the 900th anniversary of the death of St. Anselm, theologian, pastor and defender of the Church's freedom from state intervention. Anselm was probably the greatest theologian ever to have been appointed Archbishop of Canterbury. Apart from his meditations, letters and a treatise on grammar, he is best known for three works: the Monologion, the Proslogion with its ‘ontological' proof of the existence of God, and Cur Deus homo, a brilliant defence of the doctrine of the Incarnation.
This image shows the opening of Cur Deus homo in a 12th century copy of Anselm's works in Lambeth Palace Library. Much of the text, including this section, seems to have been written in the clear, elegant, hand of the historian William of Malmesbury, with some contemporary and later additions by other scribes.
Two hundred years after Anselm's death Dante placed him, with Donatus the grammarian, Nathan the prophet and St. John Chrysostom the preacher, among the stars garlanding St. Bonaventure in the twelfth Canto of the Paradiso. In our own day, Archbishop Michael Ramsey, speaking to the monks of Bec in 1967 said of Anselm "One great theme was constantly in his mind, the consistency of the truth of Christian doctrine with human reason. Reason indeed cannot create the truth, reason cannot discover it: the order must always be ‘fides quarens intellectum' [faith seeking understanding]. But because reason in man is a God-given faculty theology must be capable of commendation to reason. And all those who through the centuries have understood the role of reason in theology can hail Saint Anselm as a guide and father."
This month we remember an Archbishop of Canterbury's visit to Ireland in the late 19th century.
The photograph shows Edward White Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury (1829-1896) on the left on his tour of Ireland in September/October 1896. In the centre is William Conyngham Plunket, fourth Baron Plunket, Archbishop of Dublin (1828-1897) and on the right is William Alexander, Archbishop of Armagh (1824-1911).
On 13th September 1896, Pope Leo XIII had issued the bull ‘Apostolicae curae' which declared Anglican orders null and void. Benson began to work on a reply as he conducted his tour of Ireland, and on his return journey he met William Gladstone at Hawarden on 10th October 1896 to discuss it. He died the following day, and was buried in Canterbury Cathedral on 16th October.
Benson was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham and Trinity College, Cambridge. He later taught at Rugby School and served as headmaster of Wellington College, and among his six children were the writers A.C.Benson, E.F.Benson, Nelly Benson and R.H.Benson.
After serving as Bishop of Truro from 1877 he was appointed to Canterbury in 1883. His archiepiscopate saw the famous trial in 1889 of Edward King, Bishop of Lincoln, who was accused of ritualism, for which Benson revived the archiepiscopal court, which had only sat once since the Reformation. The trial took place in part of Lambeth Palace Library, and this, together with its dubious authority, led William Stubbs, the historian and Bishop of Oxford to describe it not as a court, but as ‘an archbishop sitting in his library'.
Three hundred years ago the Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk was rescued from the island of Juan Fernandez, off the coast of Chile, where he had survived for several years stranded and alone. His return to England in February 1709 is said to have inspired Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719).
Selkirk's celebrity contributed to the rise of travel writing as a literary genre, however its origin can be traced back further, to the publication of The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan in 1678, and this engraving (Ref: Sion A 62.4/B88 (1775)) depicts its dramatic opening scene.
It shows the pilgrim, who becomes known as Christian, in the foreground, dressed in rags with a burden on his back as he leaves the City of Destruction. The long twisting road that stretches out into the distance threatens to be hazardous and abound with challenges.
It is thought that Bunyan composed the The Pilgrim's Progress to allegorise his religious experience as a guide to others. He gravely advises his readers to ‘Beware of the by-paths and crooked Paths, Paths in which Men go astray, Paths that lead to Death and Damnation' suggesting that life is a pilgrimage and the progress is psychological rather than geographical.
Although the British Museum was established in 1753, it first opened to the public 250 years ago this month in January 1759, in Montagu House, Bloomsbury. One of the original Trustees of the Museum was Thomas Secker, Archbishop of Canterbury between 1758 and 1768, whose portrait is featured here.
Archbishop Secker took a keen interest in the details of the Museum's foundation, with the Secker papers at Lambeth Palace Library including a printed copy of the first Orders of the Trustees, interleaved with extensive annotations from the Archbishop himself. Ever conscientious, Secker raised doubts about the constitution as it stood, complaining that the "aristocratic" form of government it proposed could turn out to be the "very worst" if future Trustees lacked the integrity of the present ones.
He did note however that, "if the Principal Librarian has a tolerable share of discernment and a good heart, he will be in himself a better system of Law than will easily be contrived". Such attention to detail is entirely in keeping with Secker's episcopacy; extremely industrious, he aimed to have a thorough grasp of the minutiae of both diocesan business and of interests relating to his wider role. According to Jeremy Gregory in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, "If there is a central feature of his occupation of the see it was perhaps his near obsession with paperwork" and he is remembered as a distinguished administrator. He even initiated a reordering of the printed and archival collections of his predecessors in Lambeth Palace Library, carried out by the Librarian Andrew Coltée Ducarel.
The involvement of Archbishops of Canterbury in the role of Trustee continued throughout subsequent years. The papers of Edward White Benson contain letters from the Principal Librarian and the Director of the British Museum, as well as from the bibliographer Richard Garnett, who had occasion to petition the Archbishop on the subject of immoral books within the Museum library. Later, Archbishop Lang played a key role in the famous Codex Sinaiticus being deposited in the Museum.