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

这本800页的对开本是理查德·巴克斯特先生对他一生和时代中最值得纪念的段落的叙述（1696），由自传体论文和辅助文件组成，主要写于1664年、1665年和1670-85年，涵盖了从巴克斯特1615年出生开始的70年时间，最广泛的是君主制恢复和1660年查理二世回归之后的岁月。它的编辑是不信教的牧师马修·西尔维斯特（1636?-1708）。利必利菌的意义有三方面。首先，它是17世纪英国政治、宗教、社会、文化和文学史的无与伦比的原始历史资料。巴克斯特提供了最高层次事件的第一手资料（他会见并评论了克伦威尔、查理二世、克拉伦登、谢尔登），但他也（特别是通过他的牧师工作）见证了商业、牧师、工匠和农业阶层的大量地方成员的经历。其次，《安息经》是18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，以及对早期不墨守成规者的描述，将清教主义传递给了18世纪的异见者。在这方面，《圣物录》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17世纪英国历史的主要叙述。第三，巴克斯特是那个时期智力最敏锐、性格最复杂的人之一。他着迷于个性、气质和心理，无论是自己的还是别人的。《遗言》中充满了敏锐的认识和敏锐的人物特征，以及非常敏锐的自我审视和反思，这使得它被誉为英国传统中早期自传体作品的杰作之一，也是历史学和自传作为不同文学流派发展的关键文本。然而，西尔维斯特是一个不熟练的编辑，他承认自己“深深意识到自己无法胜任”编辑巴克斯特的“大量散文集”。他的版本由于前后不一致的正式安排而毁损，叙事形式和时间顺序混乱，被大量文献打断，文本不准确，不完整。学者们一再感叹，在这部大量参考文献的巨著（约100万字）中，主要证据的范围和丰富性在很大程度上是无法获得的。一神论历史学家亚历山大·戈登评论说：“没有一本如此重要的书被编辑得如此糟糕。”《安息》是十七世纪最重要、最充实的个人记录作品，从未得到过学术编辑的关注（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正在领导一个编辑小组，该小组受OUP委托编写了一个全面注释的五卷学术版。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；它将识别、注释和索引提到的每个人、事件和话题；它将给出一个完整的书目说明的文本，列出其组成和出版的历史，并讨论其接收；完整的引言将探讨本文的性质和意义。该项目得到了威廉姆斯博士图书馆的受托人的大力支持，该图书馆保存了大量现存的手稿，并得到了威廉姆斯博士异议研究中心的大力支持，大卫·威克斯博士和伊莎贝尔·里弗斯教授是该中心的联合主任。（该项目的详细信息可在http://www.english.qmul.ac.uk/drwilliams/research/baxter.html上找到）有一位共同研究者，莱斯特大学的约翰·科菲教授和一位学术合作伙伴，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.