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  • The Autobiography and Library of Thomas Hall B.D. (1610–1665) ed. by Denise Thomas
  • Dunstan Roberts (bio)
The Autobiography and Library of Thomas Hall B.D. (1610–1665). Ed. by Denise Thomas. Worcestershire Historical Society, new series, 26. Bristol: Printed for the Worcestershire Historical Society by 4word Ltd. 2015. 363pp. £28. issn 0141 4577.

Thomas hall was a presbyterian minister and schoolmaster, who spent much of his life at Kings Norton, near Birmingham. He was an energetic religious writer who had fourteen works printed during his lifetime. In the present volume, Denise Thomas edits what is undoubtedly the most important manuscript source relating to him (Dr Williams’s Library, MS 61.1), a bound volume containing an incomplete autobiography, a draft will, and three catalogues of books (recording more than 1,400 volumes). One of these lists books to be given to the public library at Birmingham and the others list books to be retained in Kings Norton for the use of subsequent ministers and schoolmasters.

Thomas’s book comes in two halves: a transcription of the manuscript, supported by detailed and illuminating notes, followed by a succession of appendices in which various ancillary matters are addressed. The fifth appendix is dedicated to identifying the books listed in the catalogues and, where possible, to matching them up with the copies which Hall owned. This appendix accounts for more than half of the entire volume.

The autobiography has much in common with other religious autobiographies of the period. It seeks to give readers ‘comfort & Incouragement’ by describing a life in which adversities were overcome and virtuous acts performed. There are various signs that Hall wished the work to be printed after his death and that he intended someone else to complete it. Numerous blank leaves follow the point at which the text stops, presumably so that a lengthy death-bed scene (and perhaps a funeral sermon) could be added. This gesture towards collaborative authorship may help to account for an unusual feature of the text, its being written in the third person without explicit reference to Hall as the author. Thomas is no doubt right to link this with the nascent position of autobiography in the 1650s, but it is perhaps an overstatement to describe it as having been written ‘surreptitiously as a biography penned by someone else’. One suspects that some of the closely personal details which Hall divulges (such as his sleeping habits) would have enabled readers to pierce the veil of anonymity.

The catalogue component is handled well and is testimony to a considerable amount of careful bibliographical work. A random sample of several dozen entries suggests that the identifications which Thomas provides for Hall’s catalogue entries are largely accurate, although there are some niggling low-level inconsistencies, such as whether imprints are given and, when they are, whether they are anglicised. There are also some peculiarities in the wider selection and organization of material. Details about the physical condition and location of surviving books are scattered through the transcription, whilst fairly important points (such as what the asterisks in the apparatus mean) are consigned to the endnotes. The same eclecticism is [End Page 231] apparent in the long appendix, in which readers are directed to actual copies of works which are eligible for neither an ESTC nor a USTC number, even though the relevant books can almost all be found via Copac. This probably underestimates the abilities of many readers and will almost certainly age less well than the rest of the volume.

It is curious, in a book which often inclines toward providing slightly too much information, that there is no index (of authors or short titles) to cover the three catalogues. Anyone wishing to check whether Hall owned a particular work must therefore search each catalogue individually. Though such an addition would have added weight to an already fairly weighty volume, it is noticeable that the repetition in the long appendix of the transcriptions of the catalogue entries accounts for around 40 pages.

There are a few oddities in bibliographical terminology. Thomas counts each side of a folio (i.e. a page) as a separate folio and refers...

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