Author: ANDREWES (Lancelot), Bishop of Winchester:
Title: A Manual of the Privatte [sic] Devotions and Meditations of the Right Reverend Father in God Lancelot Andrews late L. Bishop of Winchester. Translated out of a Fair Greek ms. of his Amanuensis. By R.D. B.D.
Description: London, Printed by T. Ratclif, & N. Thompson for Richard Bentley, 1674. ?THIRD EDITION of the translation by Richard Drake (d. 1681). 12mo, 129 x 71 mms., pp. [xxiv], [24], 153 [i.e. 177], [11], 97 [98 - 100 Contents], with separate letterpress title pages to the two parts (the first slightly cut down at lower margin), general pictorial engraved title page to the two parts depicting two scenes, engraved portrait frontispiece, with printed title-page detached at lower inner margin, bound in contemporary mottled calf, at some point neatly rebacked, lettered in gilt, rather rubbed, but a very sound clean copy, formerly in the library of the avid bibliophile Canon Brian James Findlay, Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, Canon of Manchester Cathedral, and Rector of Monks Eleigh. A rare edition of a classic seventeenth-century text. T. S. Eliot called Andrewes "the first great preacher of the English Catholic Church", and Frank N. Magill included Andrewes' Manual of the Private Devotions in his Masterpieces of Christian Literature. P. E. McCullough explains in brief the importance of this work and its author to the trajectory of the Church of England from the seventeenth century to the present: "The interregnum also saw the first publication of Andrewes's most enduringly popular work, the Preces privatae, Andrewes's own manual of private prayer. Composed in Greek and Latin, a prized manuscript copy was given shortly before his death by Andrewes to Laud, and Andrewes's secretary, Samuel Wright, supplied copies to a small number of other select friends. The Cambridge Laudian Richard Drake published the first complete English translation in 1648. Wright's preface offered the Preces as a Laudian antidote to the puritan cult of the sermon. They have for centuries exemplified Andrewes's prayer centred piety and become a model for Anglican private devotions. A final edition of XCVI Sermons appeared in 1661 with the restoration of the monarchy and established church. And Andrewes was again taken up as a liturgical arbiter in the revision and reintroduction of the Book of Common Prayer in 1662, primarily through the use of his manuscript notes on the Book of Common Prayer by Bishop John Cosin. Although not given canonical status as planned by Cosin, Andrewes's forms of consecration of churches and church plate, probably composed as bishop of Winchester, also became standard in the English church, and later in most parts of the Anglican communion" (Oxford DNB). For more on Andrewes and his book, see Alexander Whyte's full-length study of both: Lancelot Andrewes and His Private Devotions: A Biography, a Transcript, and an Interpretation (1896), and the more recent monograph by Marianne Dorman, Lancelot Andrewes 1555-1626: Teacher and Preacher in the Post Reformation English Church (2006). For the British Isles and Ireland, ESTC R28294 finds a copy in the British Library, and a preponderance of copies in Oxbridge (with one in Cambridge and three at Oxford), but then only Rylands and the National Trust (but the National Trust copy is terrifically imperfect, as it "wants the title page … and some text has been trimmed away by binder"). ESTC finds only four other copies, all in the United States: Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Newberry, and UCLA, but Harvard's, too, is imperfect, as it lacks the portrait, which is present in the copy on offer.

Keywords: meditation religion


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