The Antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon Church.
1810. Newcastle: Printed by Edward Walker, sold by J. Booker, and Keating and Co., London, 1810.
8vo, xvi, 528 pp., with folding coloured map frontispiece. Contemporary half calf, flat spine decorated in gilt- and blind, marbled boards. Boards and backstrip moderately worn, hinges cracked, some offsetting of map onto title-page. Bookplate of James John and Sophia Holyroyd [Colchester, England]. Ownership stamp of Patrick O’Gorman Raheen, Tullaroan, Irealand, on all four endpapers. A clean copy in a worn but contemporary binding.
§ Second edition of this history of Anglo-Saxon “ecclesiastical polity and religious practice”, first published in 1806. John Lingard (1771-1851) was a Catholic priest whose many works of history and theology funded the construction of a chapel adjoining his house in Hornby, Lancashire. He received little public recognition for his work, but his influence on historical method was significant. Lingard based his works on manuscript sources and avoided drawing on whig histories, which he mistrusted: “Who would draw from the troubled stream, when he may drink at the fountainhead?” (Introduction). “Lingard was the first English historian to make serious use of rare printed material and manuscript sources in the Vatican and other Italian libraries, as well as French dispatches, and material from the state papers of Ferdinand and Isabella and Philip II of Spain preserved in an almost inaccessible state in the Spanish castle of Simancas. The pioneering use of such material enabled him to move away from a tendency towards parochialism in English political history, placing it in a more broadly European context” (DNB). Item #105571
Price: $250.00