A Bibliography of Westminster Abbey: A Guide to the Literature of Westminster Abbey, Westminster School and St Margaret's Church Published between 1571 and 2000 (review)

The latest volume of the Westminster Abbey Record Series is a handlist of printed works relating to the Abbey, Westminster School, and the parish church of St Margaret. It is essentially an inventory of the Abbey's own library, which has an extensive collection of record publications, monographs, and historical studies, and there are several areas in which those holdings are unrivalled. In that respect the School and St Margaret's are as well served as the Abbey, though the total of 1,220 sermons excludes such exercises in the School, which may on occasion have enjoyed some of its own.

The plan of the book proceeds in each section from general works and guide books, by nature a mixed bag, to histories, general and by periods, then to buildings, their features and fittings, memorials, and institutions ranging from the library and museum to the history of music in the Abbey, coronation services, and the Order of the Bath.

The outcome is a valuable conspectus of material for the study of three celebrated and closely associated institutions of great historical interest. The tally of sermons is an obvious example, though a cursory examination suggests that there are fewer from the time of the king's trial and the Restoration than might be expected. For the rest the Abbey has attracted both scholarly and popular attention over three centuries or more, and the development of particular enquiries, notably archaeological, is one of several themes to emerge from the text.

The bibliography is not critical, and its cross-references are sparse. The indexes of authors and subjects provide pointers to titles, but for the most part users will probably have to make their own associations, and will probably not object to doing so. They may, nevertheless, if they are not familiar with the terrain, have to spend time in preliminaries, which some guidance might have spared them. One feature of the text is that works in every section are arranged in the order of their publication, not in alphabetical order of authors or titles. Studies by the same author are separated one from another, unless they appeared at machine-gun speed. It may also happen that an eye used to alphabetical order will jump to unwarrantable conclusions in its absence. Experience will no doubt resolve that. The sparing use of cross-references will not trouble those familiar with the ground, who will carry them in their mind, but may delay the pleasures that await the tyro. The report of the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments on the Abbey, the first volume of the Commissioners' five on London, has an admirable introductory essay by M. R. James on the Abbey's place in national history. It could as well appear under History as it does under Archaeology, and it should certainly be read in that context. In a similar fashion there is an interesting and atmospheric account of the famous funeral effigies in Lawrence Turner's Recollections of a Westminster Antiquary (1969) that might have borne a cross-reference from the section on the Museum and its contents to its place in Biography. Those are minor matters, and the reader will readily compensate for them; the volume offers a mass of valuable material, and will be gratefully used.