Coming soon … a major study of the Anglican clergy

Users of CCED may well be interested in a volume now being advertised by Boydell and Brewer and written by Dr Sara Slinn, a long-standing friend of the project who was enormously helpful in a former incarnation as an archivist at the Borthwick Institute to our work in York diocese.

The Education of the Anglican Clergy, 1780-1839

The Education of the Anglican Clergy, 1780-1839

This is a study of clerical recruitment in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries which significantly advances our understanding of clerical careers by overturning long-standing assumptions about the background of the late Hanoverian clergy. It reveals how boys of relatively humble social origins made successful clerical careers in much larger numbers than usually assumed. Alongside the well-known route to the church through the universities, there was an alternative route via specialist grammar schools. Other prospective ordinands located clerical tutors to help them to study for the academic parts of ordination exams and to prepare for the spiritual and pastoral aspects of their role. It draws extensively on the records of the clergy now accessible in the CCED, and also Dr Slinn’s exhaustive researches in other records which provide additional detail.

The directors of CCED should declare an interest, in that the volume is published in the series they co-edit, Studies in Modern British Religious History (now more than 30 strong!), but nevertheless they can perfectly truthfully recommend this volume as a landmark in our appreciation of the dynamics of clerical careers in this critical period, and one which will help users make sense of many of the careers that are charted within the database.

Find out more about the volume here.