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Wilkins's Copy of Sir Henry Spelman's ‘Concilia’1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2012

Extract

In his elegant prospectus to the four volumes of his Concilia, issued in 1733 in order to obtain subscriptions for the great enterprise, David Wilkins, once a penniless Prussian orientalist, now Archdeacon of Suffolk, has included a complete list of contents. He has affixed, he tells us, asterisks to each document in the list, indicating its source; one if it came from Spelman's Concilia, two if it hailed from Archbishop Wake's own collections, three if it was drawn from his own. This starring is adopted in the prefatory list of contents at the beginning of each volume of the Concilia. In a recent paper the present writer was able to identify the Archbishop's collections as vols. ccciv–cccxxxix in the Wake Archives at Christ Church, Oxford. He pointed out there that Wake's design had been to augment his volumes of transcripts and extracts originally made for his State of the Church and the Clergy of England (1703) with a view to a new and revised edition of Spelman's Concilia. Wilkins's own collections, for many years at Leeds Castle before they passed into the Phillipps Library, were sold with the Fairfax papers in 1898, and nothing has been heard of them since; but Spelman is with us, in two solid volumes of print, and we have among Wake's letters direct testimony to show that these two volumes (the second compiled by Dugdale) served as the basis for Wilkins, when, on the Archbishop's instructions, he set out to augment and correct that valuable text for the new edition of the Concilia.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Society of Antiquaries of London 1933

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References

page 155 note 2 William Bowyer, 1733.

page 155 note 3 ‘Wilkins's Concilia and the Fifteenth Century’, Trans. Royal Historical Soc., 4th Ser., vol. xv, esp. pp. 91–105.

page note 4 I am indebted to Dr. H. H. E. Craster for enabling me to trace them thus far, and for much valuable bibliographical advice in connexion with the above paper.

page note 5 Jacob, op. cit., pp. 96–7.

page 156 note 1 Mr. Percy Simpson, who is now engaged upon a study of English proof-reading from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, most kindly corroborates this view after careful examination and comparison of a number of passages with the Concilia of 1737.

page 157 note 1 Concilia, i, 24, corrected on many points by Haddan and Stubbs, Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents, iii, 38–41.

page 157 note 2 Op. cit. i. 24–5. He tacks on to this, in the same footnote, Spelman's italicized note (p. 106), the beginning of which he has slightly altered.

page 157 note 3 Concilia, i, 62.

page 158 note 1 Christ Church Library, Wake Archives, Wilkins to Wake, 3 June 1716.