Apocrypha Canon and Criticism from Samuel Fisher to John Toland, 1650-1718

Abstract

Perusing the manuscript catalogue of Stillingfleet’s library held in Marsh’s library one thing becomes immediately apparent: that is the proliferation of Biblical material of all varieties. Whether in folio, octavo or otherwise Stillingfleet owned at least seventy-two variant editions of Scriptural texts. Among this collection he owned texts as varied in time and place of publication as the famous Complutensian edition, Brian Walton’s polyglot and more obscure versions such as the Anglo-Saxon translation published at Dordrecht in 1665 or the Bible in Irish (1690). As well as owning translations of the Bible in Hebrew, Chaldaic, Greek, French, Latin and many others, Stillingfleet also possessed a full compliment of commentaries and criticism from the early Church fathers to modern critics such as Father Simon, Jean LeClerc and John Locke. To say that Scripture and biblical studies formed the basis of Stillingfleet’s collection might not be an overstatement.¹

Article Footnote

See Catalogue of Marsh’s Library. Much work needs to be undertaken analysing the nature of the collection. It is clear the library held not only orthodox but also many volumes of heterodox material. Much of the latter may have come from the library of Richard Smith: see E.G. Duff, ‘The Library of Richard Smith’, The Library 8 (1907), pp. 113-133, and J.A.1. Champion and R.H. Popkin, ‘Bibliography and Irreligion: Richard Smith’s ‘Observations on the Report of a Blasphemous Treatise by some affirmed to have been of late years published in print of three grand impostors’ c1671’, The Seventeenth Century 10 (1995), pp. 77–99.