A Biographical Dictionary of Tutors at the Dissenters' Private Academies, 1660–1729

Abstract

This remarkable resource is a product of the Dissenting Academies Project at Queen Mary University of London and Dr Williams's Library. In it Mark Burden, whose PhD was on the work of the dissenting academies, provides a biography of all the known tutors at academies between the Restoration and the opening of Phillip Doddridge's academy in 1729. The fifty-seven-page introduction makes a clear case for the production of a biographical dictionary rather than a series of institutional histories. Most of the academies were developed around one or two tutors, and tutors were the principal architects of dissenting education. As a result, the academies were migratory and often experienced periods of disuse or interruption when tutors moved or died. The other anchor of the dissenting academies was their libraries, often developed from tutors' private collections, which were similarly merged and combined as academies moved and itinerated. Burden's goal for the introduction is to provide a ‘wide-angle lens’ for the biographical entries that follow. In general he achieves that aim, covering the precarious legal status of the academies both before and after the Toleration Act of 1689, although it might have been interesting to pursue the details of the impact of the Schism Act of 1714, which appears to have closed some academies temporarily. Burden's account of the education provided by the dissenting academies is carefully measured. He regards the education as comparable to that offered by the universities and gives strong evidence of the rigorous regimen in the academies. The study of Locke was proscribed at the universities in 1703, but was common in the academies, and this suggests that they were more educationally liberal than Oxford or Cambridge. It is an interesting speculation that this may have been one of the roots of the tendency of Dissent in the eighteenth century to split over the issue of Trinitarianism and Arianism.An important aspect of both Burden's introduction and the individual biographical entries is the breadth and diversity of dissenting academies and tutors, which makes some generalizations problematic. Some academies incorporated ministerial training with the education of gentlemen others did not; some used Latin others English as the language of instruction, and some academies accepted students all year round. The ‘private’ nature of the academies lay principally in the ways in which the tutors organized and ran their courses. Only when the Presbyterian Fund Board and the Coward Trust funded students' training did some convergence and standardization occur.Following the introduction are ninety-one biographical entries, covering almost 500 pages. Burden has produced biographical articles which compare well with those in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Each entry includes a list of the tutors' works, archival sources, and references for the article. Even where a tutor has an ODNB entry Burden's articles go beyond this with information on the tutors' work, libraries, publications, and connections with other dissenting ministers. The entry on Thomas Amory (1701–74), for example, demonstrates the meticulous scholarship that comprises the dictionary. Burden has also adopted practical solutions to some of the problems that confront scholars of dissenting academies. In the case of the Coventry Academy separating the work of John Bryan, Obadiah Grew, and Thomas Shewell in local schools and the academy is difficult, especially where there is local lore about the work of such scholars. Consequently, Burden had combined some entries. This enables the work of the Coventry Academy to be seen in the work of various contributing tutors.It is clear that Burden's outstanding work will be a resource for scholars of dissenting academies for years to come. He is to be congratulated on a superb contribution to the study of dissenting academies in their formative years.