About the Library

This is a reading library of Anglican divinity, assembled so that the divines may be searched by sense as well as by the letter, and quoted with their attribution intact. It is not an edition, not an anthology, and not a commentary: the books are given whole, as they were scanned, and the reader is sent back to the printed leaf whenever the reading matters.

What is in it

3,220 volumes, divided into 1,432,286 passages, in three collections:

• The English Divines — Anglican divinity from the Reformation to the early twentieth century
• The Fathers — the primitive Church, in the Ante-Nicene and Nicene translations the divines themselves used
• Project Canterbury — Anglican history, biography, liturgy and occasional writing

How the books are chosen

The measure is the one stated on the front page: Scripture as the rule, read in the sense the primitive Church received it, with the Book of Common Prayer, the Articles, the Homilies and the Ordinal as the settled expression of that faith. A book earns its place by belonging to that tradition or by being one the tradition argues with — not by agreeing with the present editor, and not by being comfortable reading. What the divines held, they are allowed to say.

Every text is in the public domain and is taken from a public scan, chiefly the Internet Archive and Project Canterbury. Each volume links to the copy it came from, so nothing here rests on this catalogue's word alone.

What the machine does, and does not, do

Searching by sense is done with a language model over the passages, and the results are re-ranked before you see them. That is the whole of the machine's part. Nothing here is written, summarised, paraphrased or explained by a model. A search returns passages the books actually contain, with the author, title and year attached; it does not answer questions in its own voice, and there is no generated prose anywhere in the corpus.

The state of the text

The texts are machine-read from old print, and they carry the marks of it: the long ƒ for “s”, hyphenation broken across lines, garbled Greek, and the occasional word the scanner simply lost. Spelling is not modernised and errors are not silently corrected, because a correction made without the leaf in front of you is a guess. Check any quotation against the scan before you publish it.

Pagination is not carried through the transcription, so a passage is located by its number rather than by its page. How to cite explains what to give in a note.

Corrections

If a book is misattributed, a date is wrong, or a work belongs here and is missing, write to admin@anglicanlibrary.com. Corrections to the catalogue are welcome and are logged.