A Scholarly Edition of Richard Baxter's Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696)

800页的Reliquiae手册：或者说，理查德·巴克斯特先生的《他一生和时代中最难忘的段落》（1696年）由自传体论文和辅助文件组成，主要写于1664年、1665年和1670 - 1685年，涵盖了巴克斯特1615年出生后的70年，最广泛的几年后恢复君主制和查理二世的回报在1660年。它的编辑是不墨守成规的牧师马修西尔维斯特（1636？- 1708）。Reliquiae aluminium的意义有三方面。首先，它是17世纪英国政治、宗教、社会、文化和文学史上无可匹敌的主要历史来源。巴克斯特提供了第一手资料的事件在最高级别（他会见，并评论，克伦威尔，查理二世，克拉伦登，谢尔顿），但他也是（特别是通过他的部）的经验，一个伟大的范围省级成员的商人，文书，工匠和农业阶级的证人。其次，《Reliquiae》是十八世纪教会和史学传统的基础文本。它对温和清教主义的辩护和对早期不墨守成规者的描述，使基督教成为18世纪的异议。在这方面，《Reliquiae》是1688/89年“光荣革命”引发的文学内战的早期贡献者，这场内战决定了十七世纪英国历史的主要叙事。第三，巴克斯特是那个时期最敏锐的智力和最复杂的人格之一。他着迷于个性，气质和心理，他自己的和别人的。《回忆录》中充满了深刻的人物描写和深刻的自我审视与反思，被誉为英国传统早期自传体写作的杰作之一，也是史学和自传体文学发展的关键文本。然而，西尔维斯特是一个不熟练的编辑，他承认自己"深感自己无法胜任"编辑巴克斯特的"大量散页论文"这类工作"。他的版本是毁容的不一致的正式安排，在其叙事形式和年表混乱，中断的文件块，文本不准确和不完整。学者们一再感叹，在这部篇幅很长的密集参考性著作中，主要证据的范围和丰富性（c。100万字），因此基本上是不可访问的。"没有一本书的重要性是以往任何时候都更糟糕的编辑"观察到一神论历史学家亚历山大戈登。Reliquiae是最重要的和实质性的17世纪工作的个人记录从来没有收到学术编辑的关注（比较班扬，伯内特，克拉伦登，伊夫林，莫里斯，佩皮斯）。为了满足这一需求，N。H. Keeble领导着一个编辑团队，该团队受牛津大学出版社的委托，准备一个完整注释的五卷本学术版。该版本将建立一个准确和可靠的文本，从手稿工作，这是现存的;它将确定，光泽和索引提到的每一个人，事件和主题;它将给出一个完整的书目帐户的文本，阐述其组成和出版的历史，并讨论其接收;一个完整的介绍将探讨文本的性质和意义。这个项目是由威廉姆斯博士图书馆的受托人，其中持有大部分现存的手稿，以及威廉姆斯博士的异议研究中心，其中大卫威克斯博士和伊莎贝尔里弗斯教授是共同主任。(An有关计划的详情，可浏览网址：http：//www.english.qmul.ac.uk/drwilliams/research/baxter.html。有一个共同研究者，莱斯特大学的约翰科菲教授，和一个学术伙伴，奥塔哥大学的蒂姆库珀博士。

The 800-page folio Reliquiae Baxterianae: or, Mr. Richard Baxter's narrative of the Most Memorable Passages of his Life and Times (1696) consists of autobiographical papers, with supporting documents, written in the main in 1664, 1665 and 1670-85, covering the seventy-year period from Baxter's birth in 1615, most expansively the years following the restoration of monarchy and Charles II's return in 1660. Its editor was the nonconformist minister Matthew Sylvester (1636?-1708). The significance of Reliquiae Baxterianae is three-fold. First, it is an unrivalled primary historical source for seventeenth-century English political, religious, social, cultural and literary history. Baxter offers a first-hand account of events at the highest level (he met, and comments on, Cromwell, Charles II, Clarendon, Sheldon) but he is also (particularly through his ministry) a witness to the experiences of a great range of provincial members of the mercantile, clerical, artisan and agricultural classes. Secondly, the Reliquiae is a foundation text for eighteenth-century ecclesiastical and historiographical traditions. Its vindication of moderate Puritanism and its accounts of the early nonconformists passed Baxterianism on to eighteenth-century dissent. In this respect, the Reliquiae was an early contributor to the literary civil war prompted by the 'Glorious Revolution' of 1688/89 to determine the master narrative of seventeenth-century English history. Thirdly, Baxter's was one of the most acute intelligences and complex personalities of the period. He was fascinated by individuality, by temperament and by psychology, his own as much as others'. The Reliquiae is rich in sharply realised and acute characterisations and in passages of remarkably perceptive self-scrutiny and reflection, leading to its being hailed as one of the masterpieces of early autobiographical writing in the English tradition and as a key text in the development of both historiography and autobiography as distinct literary genres.Sylvester, however, was an unskilful editor, confessing himself 'deeply sensible of my inability for such Work' as editing Baxter's 'great quantity of loose Papers'. His edition is disfigured by an inconsistent formal arrangement, confused in its narrative shape and chronology, interrupted by blocks of documentation, textually inaccurate and incomplete. Scholars have repeatedly lamented that the range and richness of the primary evidence in this densely referential work of great length (c. 1,000,000 words) is consequently largely inaccessible. 'No book of its importance was ever worse edited' observed the Unitarian historian Alexander Gordon. The Reliquiae is the most significant and substantial seventeenth-century work of personal record never to have received scholarly editorial attention (compare Bunyan, Burnet, Clarendon, Evelyn, Morrice, Pepys). To address this need N. H. Keeble is leading an editorial team that has been commissioned by OUP to prepare a fully annotated five-volume scholarly edition. The edition will establish an accurate and reliable text, working from the manuscript where this is extant; it will identify, gloss and index every person, incident and topic mentioned; it will give a full bibliographical account of the text, set out the history of its composition and publication, and discuss its reception; and a full introduction will explore the nature and significance of the text.This project is strongly supported by the Trustees of Dr. Williams's Library, which holds much of the extant manuscript, and by the Dr. Williams's Centre for Dissenting Studies, of which Dr. David Wykes and Professor Isabel Rivers are co-directors. (An account of the project is available at http://www.english.qmul.ac.uk/drwilliams/research/baxter.html.) There is one coinvestigator, Professor John Coffey of Leicester University, and one academic partner, Dr Tim Cooper of Otago University.