Lambeth Palace Library: Treasures from the Collection of the Archbishops of Canterbury

While Lambeth Palace looms large across the river from the nerve centre of British politics, it is less well known to visitors than it deserves to be. For just two months over the early summer, Lambeth Palace Library displayed some of the ‘treasures’ collected by Archbishops of Canterbury over the centuries to celebrate the library’s foundation by Bishop Bancroft 400 years ago. The curators have edited a glorious accompanying book, adorned with colourful reproductions from the Lambeth Bible (made in Canterbury c.1150-70), though the scope of the exhibition extended far beyond the medieval period. Inasmuch as the English polity has maintained a carefully crafted balance between church and state, and English identity has for centuries been closely linked to a Christian one, the treasures of Lambeth Palace are of great interest.

Arranged in the evocative space of the library, the exhibition demonstrated the challenges faced by each archbishop in his time. Many of the books on display reached the archbishops’ collections after the Reformation: volumes from religious houses, such as the 12th-century writings of Prior Clement of the Augustinian house at Llanthony, now best known as a most interesting ruin from the east to Hay on Wye. The liturgical books prepared for an archbishop, such as the great church bureaucrat Henry Chichele in the early-15th century, reveal the fine workmanship that developed in England under the influence of French scribes and illuminators. They demonstrate too that, despite their political role, archbishops were priests, bound to and by the daily rhythms of the Christian calendar. The exhibition also showed examples of the typical – now printed – books from the eve of the Reformation (devotional writings illustrated by engravings and woodcuts), including The Orchard of Syon for the mystically minded and, for a wider audience, guidebooks on how to die well (Danse Macabre and Primers), which were produced in great numbers.

For the period of the Reformation itself the displays were more varied, with items that revealed how involved the archbishops were in all areas of learning and in fateful political developments too. They included, for example, maps of a world whose known parts were growing apace. But most touching are the fragile remnants of greatness: Elizabeth I’s prayer book, ‘lifted’ from Whitehall by a Mr Joliffe during the Civil War; the Order for the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, a recent purchase by the Library; and tracts on witchcraft collected by Archbishop Bancroft in the  late 16th century, part of an informed library on one of the most challenging issues of the day. The century of Civil War was represented by the tracts on kingship such as Basilika, penned by Charles I himself, or symbols of Protestant revenge, such as a dagger, one of many procured in the aftermath of the Popish Plot.

The global turn of the Anglican Church – the church of the British Empire – was illustrated in the papers relating to the building of churches in Australia as well as materials, including photographs, from the first Lambeth Conference, held in 1867, at which the leaders of the Anglican Communion met. The Church’s reaction to the challenges of modernity was reflected in items from the collection of the Mothers’ Union, its Temperance campaigns and in the letters exchanged between Archbishop Bell and the poet and Anglican T.S. Eliot. One of the most moving is a set of letters – one in protest and one in support – about Archbishop Temple’s BBC broadcast against the area bombing of German cities during the Second World War.

I list all of these to entice the reader to acquire the book, now that the all-too-short exhibition has ended. As exhibitions go, this was enlightening and of moment, full of small surprises. We have clearly reached the end of an age of blockbuster exhibitions, vast and all-embracing. Yet, here was an alternative, an intelligent small offering, which nonetheless educated through pursuing a single interesting vantage point. One need not be Anglican or religious at all to appreciate the role played by the Church of England – sometimes as a critic of the vanity of rulers,  other times as advisers and helpers to them. At a time when the Church is debating vital issues – the relief of poverty and disease, equality between men and women, the terms of coexistence between religions in a dangerous world – this was a timely exhibition and a highly edifying one too. Buy the book.

Readers can obtain the book from Antique Collectors Club, Sandy Lane, Old Martlesham, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 4SD. Telephone: 01394 389950           

Miri Rubin is the author of Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (Penguin, 2010).