Church of England Record Society

History of the Society

The inaugural meeting of the Church of England Record Society took place in the Great Hall, Lambeth Palace, on 19th December 1991, and concluded with a lecture by the Society’s first president, Professor Patrick Collinson, entitled ‘An embarrassment of riches: the records of the first hundred years of the Reformed Church of England’.

The Society was founded with the object of promoting interest in and knowledge of the history of the Church of England from the sixteenth century onwards. The Society aims to do this by publishing primary material of significance for the history of the Church of England, whether in the form of letters, diaries, treatises, visitation articles, or other documents. Since the intention is to publish material of national, as distinct from purely local interest, the Society is not in competition with local or county record societies.

The Society publishes one volume each year in association with the publishers, Boydell & Brewer. This ambitious publishing programme was inaugurated in 1994 with the publication of Dr. Kenneth Fincham’s Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Early Stuart Church, vol. 1. Thereafter a further fourteen volumes illustrative of all periods of church history since the Reformation have been published. These include The Anglican Canons, 1529-1947, and the complementary volume Tudor Church Reform, both edited by Professor Gerald Bray, the Dedham conference and the combination lecture at Bury St. Edmunds, 1582-90, Samuel Rogers’s diary, 1634-8, material on the Synod of Dort, letters of Bishop Richard Hurd, the speculum of Archbishop Secker, texts on the nursing Sisterhood of All Saints, and correspondence of Bishop Bell on the crisis in German Protestantism in the 1930’s. The first miscellany volume, entitled From Cranmer to Davidson, was published in 1999, and a second miscellany, on Evangelicalism in the Church of England, late 18th-19th century, followed in 2004. 2007 saw the publication of two volumes, namely Dr. Blackmore’s edition on the revival of deaconesses in the 19th century (2006 subscription volume), and the first of two volumes of The Letters of Theophilus Lindsey by Dr. G.M. Ditchfield (2007 subscription volume).

The Annual General Meeting normally takes place in July in the Great Hall, Lambeth Palace, and is preceded by the Annual Lecture.

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