Note: A Rediscovery Concerning the Swarthmore Manuscripts
Rent from DeepDyve- Note: A Rediscovery Concerning the Swarthmore Manuscripts
In the fall of 2008, Josef Keith, librarian at Friends House, London, was assisting me with research into volume seven of the "Swarthmore Manuscripts."1 Keith had confirmed early on what I and most every scholar of volumes v, vi, and vii believed to be true; that there was no transcript of these documents into a modern hand.2 They had to be studied from the originals. In the United States that means studying microfilms of the documents, of which there are four complete sets.3
In truth, there are complete transcriptions of volumes v, vi, and vii. This work was finished in 1939, by staff of the Library at Friends House, London.4 Not only that, they were microfilmed in 1990. However, the numbering of the transcript volumes did not follow the numbering of the Swarthmore Manuscript volumes. Transcript volume number six contains all of the contents of Swarthmore Manuscripts volume vii. The microfilm that includes this transcript also contains the transcripts for volumes v and vi. Josef Keith untangled this cataloging difficulty and emailed me his findings on 29 October, 2008. I obtained the microfilm that includes the transcripts for volume vii and can confirm that the documents of that collection are indeed all transcribed therein. The transcription excludes from the back of at least one letter some shorthand that no one (yet) seems to be able to read.
Recognition must go to Josef Keith for sticking with my persistent questions, probing obscure records of records and attendant, sometimes misleading in this case, cataloging. How Henry J. Cadbury might not have been aware of the original transcription work when he was finishing up his work on the invaluable Annual Catalogue(Note 1), or failed to make mention of it to other scholars is a present mystery. With regard to the study of the Swarthmore Manuscripts as a whole, the scholarly world can now be reconnected to a large body of work done seventy years ago. The transcriber(s) remain anonymous. It seems to me there was also a specific regard and affection for their benefactor, Juliet M. Morse (Note 4). [End Page 46]
Eric H. Edwards is a recorded minister in the Society of Friends and a member of Sandwich Monthly meeting in Massachusetts. He holds a Masters Degree in English from Boston University.
Notes
1. The Swarthmore Manuscripts are described by William C. Braithwaite in The Beginnings of Quakerism to 1660 (York, England: William Sessions Limited in Association with the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, Second Edition Revised by Henry J. Cadbury, 1981), 538-542; and by Henry J. Cadbury in The Annual Catalogue of George Fox's Papers (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Edwards Brothers Inc., Lithoprinters and Publishers, 1939), 3, 25. Braithwaite refers to the "Swarthmore Collection" of seven volumes. This is what Cadbury and others after him all refer to as the Swarthmore Manuscripts. Cadbury also placed about 83 documents from volume vii into the Annual Catalogue, explaining the sources of the Swarthmore documents as best he could from the original catalogue. A more complete analysis of the relationship between the Catalogue and the Manuscripts remains to be done.
2. Thomas Canby Jones relates a diagnostic story of this understanding in the Preface of his book "The Power of the Lord is Over All" The Pastoral Letters of George Fox (Richmond, Indiana: Friends United Press, 1989), iii, iv. The first four volumes of the Swarthmore Manuscripts were transcribed by Emily Jermyn (although some researchers report her name as Elizabeth Jermyn) around 1867, and were microfilmed in 1990. Ms Jermyn also did other Fox transcriptions.
3. They are at Haverford College, Swarthmore College, Harvard Divinity School, and Earlham College.
4. The front pages of the transcriptions for volumes v, vi, and vii, contain an index of the documents by author as well as an identification of the nature of the document, date if known, volume and document number in the Swarthmore Manuscript itself, and the page number in the transcript volume; a photograph on its own page, certainly of Juliet M. Morse, and the following dedication on its own page:
Inscribed in Remembrance of...
