Friends of DWL Annual Lectures

Within a year of the establishment of the Friends of Dr Williams's Library, that industrious group had instituted a series of annual lectures that continue today to promote interest in, and support for, the Library's collections. The inaugural Lecture was delivered by the DWL Librarian, Stephen Kay Jones, on 7 October 1947, and was appropriately entitled ‘Dr Williams and his Library’. A lecture is given every year by a leading authority in her or his field.

For almost 70 years the lecture series has been characterised by its wide subject range, covering not only dissenting traditions but wider theological, scientific and literary matters. The intellectual breadth of the lecture series is reflective of the collections and interests of those figures and institutions whose books and papers now comprise the Dr Williams's Library collection, hence the lectures also offer a guide to the use of Library.

The series has been especially strong in addressing ancient, medieval and non-western religions, beliefs and philosophies, with titles on the Byzantine Church (The Church in the Byzantine Dark Ages, by Averil Cameron, 1993), Zoroastrianism (Zoroastrianism: A Shadowy but Powerful Presence in the Judaeo-Christian World, by Mary Boyce, 1987), Hinduism (The Significance of the Bhagavad-GÄ«tÄ for Christian Theology, by Geoffrey Parrinder, 1968) and the Kabbalah (Symbols for the Divine in the Kabbalah, by Louis Jacob, 1984).

The Lectures are scholarly serial publications, published by the Dr Williams’s Trust. From 2016, they will be peer-reviewed, and available online. The editorial board of the Friends is responsible for seeing the lecture through to publication:

Editor:

Professor Anne Dunan-Page (Aix-Marseille University)

Committee:

Professor Sarah Hutton (University of York) and Emeritus Professor W. R. (Bob) Owens (University of Bedfordshire)

Editorial Correspondence:

Friends of Dr Williams’s Library Annual Lectures
Dr Williams’s Library
14 Gordon Square
London WC1H 0AR

The table below gives the full run of lectures from 1948. Most of the lectures were published in the year following their delivery. Nearly all of the lectures can be consulted at Dr Williams's Library and most are available to purchase. You can order printed copies by cheque (in sterling, payable to Dr Williams's Trust).

To order a printed copy of the titles, please return the Order Form with your payment to:

C/O Katie Cargill Thompson

Friends of Dr Williams’s Library Annual Lectures
Dr Williams’s Library,
14 Gordon Square,
London WC1H 0AR

Individual titles are priced £5.00

Friends of Dr Williams's Library: £2.50

§ indicates publication is forthcoming

* indicates that the lecture is now out of print.

** Indicates that the lecture was unprinted.

	Title	Speaker	Year
1	Dr Williams and his Library	Stephen Kay Jones	1947
2	Literary Criticism, Common Sense and the Bible	Frederic G. Kenyon	1948
3	The Book of Common Prayer and Worship of Non-Anglican Churches	William D. Maxwell	1949
4	The Hebrew Scrolls from the Neighbourhood of Jerico and the Dead Sea	Godfrey Rolles Driver	1950	*
5	Richard Baxter and Phillip Doddridge: A Study in Tradition	Geoffrey F. Nuttall	1951	*
6	The Trial of Jesus	G. D. Kilpatrick	1952
7	Organic Design: Scientific Thought from Ray to Paley	C. E. Raven	1953
8	The True and the Valid	Richard Ithamar Aaron	1954
9	Cistercians & Cluniacs: The Controversy between St. Bernard and Peter the Venerable	M. D. Knowles	1955
10	The Religious Philosophy of Dean Mansel	W. R. Matthews	1956
11	Sir Robert Walpole, Samuel Holden, and the Dissenting Deputies,	Norman C. Hunt	1957
12	Facts and Obligations	Dorothy Emmet	1958
13	Ascetics and Humanists in Eleventh-Century Byzantium	J. M. Hussey	1959
14	The Essene Problem	Matthew Black	1960
15	A Neglected Text of The Song of Songs	W. D. McHardy	1961	**
16	Daniel Williams, Presbyterian Bishop	Roger Thomas	1962
17	A Mirror of Elizabethan Puritanism	Patrick Collinson	1963
18	Methodism and the Puritans	John A. Newton	1964
19	Friends of Humanity; With Special Reference to the Quaker, William Allen (1770-1843)	L. Hugh Doncaster	1965
20	From Darwin to Blatchford: The Role of Darwinism in Christian Apologetic, 1875-1910	John Kent	1966
21	Dissenters and Public Affairs in Mid-Victorian England	Frank Reyner Salter	1967
22	The Significance of the Bhagavad-Gita for Christian Theology	E. Geoffrey Parinder	1968
23	Joseph Butler, 1692-1752, Author of The Analogy of Religion: some Features of his Life and Thought	Ian T. Ramsey	1969
24	Edward Carpenter, 1844-1929: Democratic Author and Poet	Edward Carpenter	1970
25	John a Lasco, 1499-1560: A Pole in Reformation England	Basil Hall	1971
26	A Seventeenth-Century Defender of Islam: Henry Stubbe (1632-76) and his Book	P. M. Holt	1972
27	Piety in Queen Victoria’s Reign	Elizabeth Longford	1973
28	Which God is Dead?	R. C. Zaehner	1974
29	John Foxe the Martyrologist: His Life and Time	Neville Williams	1975
30	Architects of Dissent: Some Nonconformist Patrons and their Architects	Christopher Stell	1976
31	Hanserd Knollys and Radical Dissent in the 17th century	B. R. White	1977
32	Life and Story in the Pilgrim’s Progress	Roger Sharrock	1978
33	A Venerable Dissenting Institution Dr William’s Library, 1729-1979	Ernest A. Payne	1979
34	Church, State, and Learning in Twelfth Century Byzantium	Robert Browning	1980
35	Belmont’s Portias: Victorian Nonconformists and Middle-Class Education for Girls	Clive Binfield	1981
36	Peter and Jack: Roman Catholics and Dissent in Eighteenth Century England	Eamon Duffy	1982
37	Godly Exercises or the Devil’s Dance?: Puritanism and Popular Culture in Pre-Civil War England	Jeremy Goring	1983
38	Symbols for the Divine in the Kabbalah	Louis Jacobs	1984
39	Denominationalism and Dissent, 1795-1835: A Question of Identity	David M. Thompson	1985
40	The Crusades and the Unity of Christendom	Donald MacGillivray Nicol	1986
41	Zoroastrianism: A Shadowy but Powerful Presence in the Judaeo-Christian World	Mary Boyce	1987
42	The Theology of Rhetoric: The Epistle to the Hebrews	Christopher Francis Evans	1988
43	The Idea of Tolerance and the Act of Toleration	Johannes van den Berg	1989
44	The Fortunes of English Puritanism	Nicholas Tyacke	1990
45	Loving & Free Converse: Richard Baxter in his Letters	N. H. Keeble	1991
46	Is Christianity a Historical Religion?	Keith Ward	1992
47	The Church in the Byzantine Dark Ages	Averil Cameron	1993
48	John Wesley, 1703-1791: A Bicentennial Tribute	John Walsh	1994
49	Why did the English Stop Going to Church?	Michael Watts	1995
50	‘To revive the memory of some excellent men’: Edmund Calamy and the Early Historians of Nonconformity	David L. Wykes	1996
51	Theophilus Lindsey: From Anglican to Unitarian	G. M. Ditchfield	1997
52	The Jewish Messiah: The Future of a Delusion	Dan Cohn-Sherbok	1998
53	Dr Williams's Library: The Last Fifty Years	John Creasey	1999
54	Puritanism and the Origins of the English Civil War	W. M. Lamont	2000
55	Those Eighteenth Century Divines: Writing for the New Dictionary of National Biography	Alan Ruston	2001
56	The Defence of Truth through the Knowledge of Error: Philip Doddridge’s Academy Lectures	Isabel Rivers	2002
57	‘If it looks like an elephant’: Defining the Crusade	Norman Housley	2003
58	The Ethiopic Book of Enoch in Recent Research	Michael A. Knibb	2004
59	The Letters of Theophilus Lindsey and the cause of Protestantism in late Eighteenth-Century Britain	G. M. Ditchfield	2005
60	Continuity and Change in Protestant Preaching in Early Modern England	I. M. Green	2006
61	A Darker Shade of Pepys: The Ent’ring Book of Roger Morrice	Mark Goldie	2007
62	From Ritualist to Radical: The Theology of Milton	Gordon Campbell	2008
63	Henry Crabb Robinson and the Founding of University Hall	Rosemary Ashton	2009
64	The Intellectual Attainments of Evangelical Nonconformity: A Nineteenth-Century Case-Study	D. W. Bebbington	2010
65	The King James Bible of 1611: The Making of a Classic Translation	Alister McGrath	2011
66	The Laity and Preaching in Post-Reformation England	John Spurr	2012
67	Harmless Freedom. John Biddle, John Knowles and the Reception of Polish Socinian Defences of Toleration, c.1650-1665	Justin Champion	2013
68	Revisiting Religion and the British Soldier in the First World War	Michael Snape	2014
69	The Life of Friends in an Age of Revolutions: James Wodrow (1730-1810) and Samuel Kenrick (1728-1811)	Martin Fitzpatrick	2015
70	Dr Williams's Library 1729-1793 "a good library, under the direction of the dissenters"	Alan Argent	2016
71	Thomas Cromwell's Religion Revisited	Diarmaid MacCulloch	2017
72	'A Treasury, or Library of Parliament Sermons': 1640s Fast Sermons and the History of the Book.	Ann Hughes	2018
73	Archives of Dissent: Family, Memory, and the English Nonconformist Tradition.	Alexandra Walsham	2019