Biographical dictionary of tutors at the dissenters’ private academies, 1660–1729

Abstract

Biographical dictionary of tutors at the dissenters' private academies, 1660-1729, by Mark Burden, London, Dr Williams's Centre for Dissenting Studies, 2013, online at http:// www. english. qmul. ac.uk/drwilliams/pub s/dictionary.htmlThe Dissenting Academies Project, based in Queen Mary, University of London, and Dr Williams's Library, London, has made some of the most important recent contributions to our understanding of the social, political and religious cultures of the late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. The project focuses on the educational institutions set up to provide training for dissenting clergy - and, increasingly, laymen - in the period between the Restoration and the founding of those new universities in London and the provinces which did not require a confessional test. As such, the project has suggested new ways of understanding the character and content of educational method and religious practice in early modern England, and has generated a series of new research questions related to the work of the many key intellectual figures whose formation took place within these academies - their number including Joseph Butler, Daniel Defoe, Philip Doddridge, Samuel Wesley and Isaac Watts. Since 2006, scholars associated with the project have made a series of key interventions into our reconstruction of the intellectual cultures of dissent and the environments which it inhabited. The extraordinary catalogue of events and publications on the project website bears witness to the vitality and energy of the founding directors, Isabel Rivers and David Wykes, and their colleagues. And greatly to its credit, the project has made a number of its most important outputs freely available for download - among them Mark Burden's Biographical Dictionary of Tutors at the Dissenters ' Private 1660-1729.It is difficult to exaggerate the significance of this publication. The Biographical Dictionary offers 91 accounts of the lives of tutors in dissenting academies between the Restoration (1660) and the opening of Philip Doddridge's academy (1729). Based on its author's unpublished PhD thesis (Academical Learning at the Dissenters' Private Academies, University of London, 2012), and anticipating some of the themes of the project's major multi-authored print output, A History of the Dissenting Academies in the British Isles, 1660-1860 (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), the Biographical Dictionary outlines new ways of imagining and analysing some of the most important and least understood of English institutions and educational cultures. Burden's substantial introduction describes the significance of the dictionary. Most of the work that has been done on the academies has depended upon the conclusions of Irene Parker's Dissenting Academies in England (1914), Herbert McLachlan's English Education under the Test Acts (1931) and J. …