The Parker Society

The Parker Society was got up at the turn of the 1840s and began issuing volumes in 1841, named for Matthew Parker (1504-75), Elizabeth I's first Archbishop of Canterbury and a celebrated collector of manuscripts.¹ Its purpose was polemical as much as antiquarian: the Tractarian movement of the 1830s had spoken slightingly of the English Reformation, and the Society set out to put the Reformers' own writings back before the Church of England in attractive form. Its council drew in High Churchmen and evangelicals alike, and the Tractarians answered with a rival series, the Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology.¹ Working on subscription, it issued four or five volumes a year until publication closed in the mid-1850s; the finished set is variously counted at 54 to 56 volumes, depending on how the general index and the Latin originals of the Original Letters are reckoned.² Printing was done at Cambridge University Press.³ Three of the volumes are Henry Walter's editions of William Tyndale, catalogued here.