Richard Baxter Quatercentenary Symposium
Friday 13 November 2015
Dr Williams’s Library, 14 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0AR
2015 marks the 400th anniversary of the birth of the Puritan pastor and writer, Richard Baxter (1615-1691). A symposium to commemorate this event and to assess the significance of Baxter’s contribution to seventeenth-century religious, political, literary and scientific culture in Britain, Europe and North America will be held at Dr Williams’s Library on Friday 13 November 2015. Confirmed speakers include Professor Nigel Smith (Princeton), Professor Ann Hughes (Keele) and Professor Howard Hotson (Oxford). The event will also profile two major editorial projects designed to make Baxter’s key manuscripts accessible to a contemporary scholarly readership: the AHRC-funded edition of Reliquiae Baxterianae and the nine-volume edition of Baxter’s correspondence (both forthcoming with Oxford University Press).
Image: Richard Baxter, courtesy of the Trustees of Dr Williams’s Library.
Click here for a calendar of the Richard Baxter Collection at Dr Williams’s Library.
Provisional Programme
12:00-12:30 Buffet Lunch
12:30-15:00 Richard Baxter and Seventeenth-Century Britain, Europe and North America 12:30-13:15 Professor Howard Hotson (Oxford) ‘“What I had out of books”: Richard Baxter and “the general reformation of common learning”’
13:15-14:00 Professor Ann Hughes (Keele) ‘“Doubtless a godly man, though tenacious in his mistakes” (Simeon Ashe on Richard Baxter, 1656): Baxter and English Presbyterians’
14:00-14:45 Professor Nigel Smith (Princeton) ‘Richard Baxter and International Protestantism: by Grammar or by Numbers’
14:45-15:15 Further Discussion
15:15-15:30 Coffee Break
15:30-16:30 The Editing of Richard BaxterProfessor Neil Keeble (Stirling) and Dr Thomas Charlton (DWL) on the Reliquiae Baxterianae (Oxford UP, 5 vols)Dr Johanna Harris (Exeter) and Dr Alison Searle (Sydney) on the correspondence of Richard Baxter (Oxford UP, 9 vols)
16:00-16:30 Discussion and Questions
16:30 Convene at a nearby venue (TBC) for drinks