This first complete history of Dr Williams's Trust and Library, deriving from the will of the nonconformist minister Daniel Williams (c.1643-1716) reveals rare examples of private philanthropy and dissenting enterprise. The library contains the fullest collection of material relating to English Protestant Dissent. Opening in the City of London in 1730, it moved to Bloomsbury in the 1860s. Williams and his first trustees had a vision for Protestant Dissent which included maintaining connections with Protestants overseas. The charities espoused by the trust extended that vision by funding an Irish preacher, founding schools in Wales, sending missionaries to native Americans, and giving support to Harvard College. By the mid-eighteenth century, the trustees had embraced unitarian beliefs and had established several charities and enlarged the unique collection of books, manuscripts and portraits known as Dr Williams's Library. The manuscript and rare book collection offers material from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, with strengths in the early modern period, including the papers of Richard Baxter, Roger Morrice, and Owen Stockton. The eighteenth-century archive includes the correspondence of the scientist and theologian Joseph Priestley. The library also holds several collections of importance for women's history and English literature. The story of the trust and library reveals a rare example of private philanthropy over more than three centuries, and a case study in dissenting enterprise. Alan Argent illuminates key themes in the history of nonconformity; the changing status of non-established religions; the voluntary principle; philanthropy; and a lively concern for society as a whole.

Elsie Chamberlain was a leading figure in British broadcasting and religious life. She was a pioneer in many areas: the first woman chaplain to the armed forces; the first nonconformist minister to marry an Anglican clergyman; the first woman producer in the religious broadcasting dept of the BBC and the first woman to present the daily service on the radio. Her broadcasting accustomed many listeners to the idea of a woman leading public worship. And she became the first woman to occupy the chair of the Congregational Union of England and Wales and almost certainly the first woman anywhere in the world to head a major denomination. Elsie Chamberlain is the first full biography and a critical appreciation of this exceptional woman. Using original church and BBC archive sources, the book tells the story of a woman who did more than any other to change the way Christian women ministers are viewed.

Elsie Chamberlain was a leading figure in British broadcasting and religious life. She was a pioneer in many areas: the first woman chaplain to the armed forces; the first nonconformist minister to marry an Anglican clergyman; the first woman producer in the religious broadcasting department of the BBC and the first woman to present the daily service on the radio. Her broadcasting accustomed many listeners to the idea of a woman leading public worship. And she became the first woman to occupy the chair of the Congregational Union of England and Wales and almost certainly the first woman anywhere in the world to head a major denomination. Elsie Chamberlain is the first full biography and a critical appreciation of this exceptional woman. Using original church and BBC archive sources, the book tells the story of a woman who did more than any other to change the way Christian women ministers are viewed.

Edition of young men's magazines from just before the First World War, presenting a vivid and touching picture of life at the time. The Angels' Voice was the title given to a magazine which circulated among a group of some 40 or so young men in Brixton between 1910 and 1913, all members of the Young Men's Bible Class of Trinity Congregational Church there. In its pages they teased each other, their sisters and girlfriends in poetry, drawings and witty, innocent articles. We see them playing football, going on country rambles, roller-skating, cycling, smoking (a lot), arguing about politics and women's rights, taking day trips to France and holidays in the Channel Islands, Belgium and Italy, and even working in Switzerland, India and the Canary Islands. This magazine offers an unique insight into life in London in general, and the lives and attitudes of lower middle-class young men in one suburb in particular, on the eve of the outbreak of the First World War, during which many of them were to serve and several of them were to die; its pages depict the world lost in the trenches of France and Flanders. The magazines are presented here with an introduction and full notes, with an appendix providing biographical information on many of those connected with them. ALAN ARGENT grew up in south London. He is minister of Trinity Congregational Church, Brixton, and Research Fellow at Dr Williams's Library, London. He has written a biography of Elsie Chamberlain, and a history of Congregationalism in the twentieth century.

The Richard Baxter treatises are here catalogued for the first time with clear summaries of their content, affording rich opportunities for research. Richard Baxter (1615-1691) was among the most prominent English nonconformist divines. Baxter found common ground with the Puritans but sought unity among Protestants in general. A highly independent thinker, he had opinions - andoften expressed them - about every major controversy in England during his lifetime. He wrote over 140 published works, among them long, controversial discourses on doctrine but also polemical works against Quakers, Baptists andRoman Catholics, among others. Baxter found himself a peacemaker during the English Civil Wars: a chaplain for the parliamentary army, he also supported the restoration of the king. As a moderate, Baxter was a target for both extremes. He eventually registered himself as 'a meer Nonconformist', breaking with the Church of England because of his opposition to its form of episcopacy. He suffered bouts of imprisonment for his religious views and conduct during the reigns of Charles II and James II. Dr Williams's Library, London contains most of Baxter's extant manuscripts, including several 'volumes' of his unpublished 'Treatises', numbering roughly 369 items in total. The volumes,ranging from the 1630s to 1690s, consist of tracts, disputations, sermons, exercises, letters, miscellaneous papers and drafts, some of which were later incorporated into Baxter's published autobiographical writings, ReliquiaeBaxterianae (1696). The treatises themselves, however, have been largely overlooked. Here, they are catalogued with clear summaries of their content, and they afford rich opportunities for research. This catalogue, the firstdetailed listing and description for 150 years, provides a physical description and a scholarly outline of each treatise. A comprehensive introduction sets these papers in context. ALAN ARGENT is Research Fellow at Dr Williams's Library, London and minister of Trinity Congregational Church, Brixton. He has written a biography of Elsie Chamberlain, a history of Congregationalism in the twentieth century and has edited The Angels' Voice for the London Record Society. His 2016 Friends of Dr Williams's Library lecture Dr Williams's Library 1729-1793 - 'a good library, under the direction of the dissenters' was published in 2017. He is preparing a history of Dr Williams's Library and Trust 1716-2016.

This is the fifth volume of a projected translation into English of all twelve of Jean Racine's plays. Geoffrey Alan Argent's translations faithfully convey all the urgency and keen psychological insight of Racine's dramas, and the coiled strength of his verse, while breathing new vigor into the time-honored form of the "heroic" couplet. Complementing this translation are the Discussion and the Notes and Commentary-particularly detailed and extensive for this volume, Britannicus being by far Racine's most historically informed play. Also noteworthy is Argent's reinstatement of an eighty-two-line scene, originally intended to open Act III, that has never before appeared in an English translation of this play. Britannicus, one of Racine's greatest plays, dramatizes the crucial day when Nero-son of Agrippina and stepson of the late emperor Claudius-overcomes his mother, his wife Octavia, his tutors, and his vaunted "three virtuous years" in order to announce his omnipotence. He callously murders his innocent stepbrother, Britannicus, and effectively destroys Britannicus's beloved, the virtuous Junia, as well. Racine may claim, in his first preface, that this tragedy "does not concern itself at all with affairs of the world at large," but nothing could be further from the truth. The tragedy represented in Britannicus is precisely that of the Roman Empire, for in Nero Racine has created a character who embodies the most infamous qualities of that empire - its cruelty, its depravity, and its refined barbarity.

This is the third volume of a projected translation into English of all twelve of Jean Racine's plays--only the third time such a project has been undertaken. For this new translation, Geoffrey Alan Argent has rendered these plays in the verse form that Racine might well have used had he been English: namely, the "heroic" couplet. Argent has exploited the couplet's compressed power and flexibility to produce a work of English literature, a verse drama as gripping in English as Racine's is in French.

Complementing the translation are the illuminating Discussion, intended as much to provoke discussion as to provide it, and the extensive Notes and Commentary, which offer their own fresh and thought-provoking insights.

In Iphigenia, his ninth play, Racine returns to Greek myth for the first time since Andromache. To Euripides's version of the tale he adds a love interest between Iphigenia and Achilles. And dissatisfied with the earlier resolutions of the Iphigenia myth (her actual death or her eleventh-hour rescue by a dea ex machina), Racine creates a wholly original character, Eriphyle, who, in addition to providing an intriguing new denouement, serves the dual dramatic purpose of triangulating the love interest and galvanizing the wholesome "family values" of this play by a jolt of supercharged passion.

As Voltaire famously opined, Athaliah, Racine's last play, is "perhaps the greatest masterwork of the human spirit." Its formidable antagonists, Athaliah, queen of Judah, and Jehoiada, high priest of the temple of Jerusalem, are engaged in a deadly struggle for dominion: she, fiercely determined to maintain her throne and exterminate the detested race of David; he, no less fiercely determined to overthrow this heathen queen and enthrone the orphan Joash, the scion of the house of David, whom Athaliah believes she slew as an infant ten years earlier. This boy represents the sole hope for the survival of the royal race from which is to spring the Christ. But in this play, even God is more about hate and retribution than about love and mercy.

This is the fourth volume of a projected translation into English of all twelve of Jean Racine's plays--only the third time such a project has been undertaken. For this new translation, Geoffrey Alan Argent has rendered these plays in the verse form that Racine might well have used had he been English: namely, the "heroic" couplet. Argent has exploited the couplet's compressed power and flexibility to produce a work of English literature, a verse drama as gripping in English as Racine's is in French. Complementing the translation are the illuminating Discussion, intended as much to provoke discussion as to provide it, and the extensive Notes and Commentary, which offer their own fresh and thought-provoking insights.

This is the second volume of a projected translation into English of all twelve of Jean Racine's plays--only the third time such a project has been undertaken in the three hundred years since Racine's death. For this new translation, Geoffrey Alan Argent has taken a fresh approach: he has rendered these plays in rhymed "heroic" couplets. While Argent's translation is faithful to Racine's text and tone, his overriding intent has been to translate a work of French literature into a work of English literature, substituting for Racine's rhymed alexandrines (hexameters) the English mode of rhymed iambic pentameters, a verse form particularly well suited to the highly charged urgency of Racine's drama and the coiled strength of his verse.

Complementing the translation are the illuminating Discussion, intended as much to provoke discussion as to provide it, and the extensive Notes and Commentary, which clarify obscure references, explicate the occasional gnarled conceit, and offer their own fresh and thought-provoking insights.

Bajazet, Racine's seventh play, first given in 1672, is based on events that had taken place in the Sultan's palace in Istanbul a mere thirty years earlier. But the twilit, twisting passageways of the Seraglio merely serve as a counterpart to the dim and errant moral sense of the play's four protagonists: Bajazet, the Sultan's brother; Atalide, Bajazet's secret lover; Roxane, the Sultaness, who is madly in love with Bajazet and dangles over his head the death sentence the Sultan has ordered her to implement in his absence; and Akhmet, the wily, well-intentioned Vizier, who involves them all in an imbroglio in the Seraglio, with disastrous consequences. Unique among Racine's plays, Bajazet provides no moral framework for either protagonists or audience. We watch as these benighted characters, cut adrift from any moral moorings, with no upright character at hand to serve as an ethical anchor and no religious or societal guidelines to serve as a lifeline, flail, flounder, and finally drag one another down. Here, Racine has presented us with his four most mercilessly observed, most subtly delineated, and most ambiguously fascinating characters. Indeed, Bajazet is certainly Racine's most undeservedly neglected tragedy.

This is the first volume of a planned translation into English of all twelve of Jean Racine's plays--a project undertaken only three times in the three hundred years since Racine's death. For this new translation, Geoffrey Alan Argent has taken a fresh approach: he has rendered these plays in rhymed "heroic" couplets. While Argent's translation is faithful to Racine's text and tone, his overriding intent has been to translate a work of French literature into a work of English literature, substituting for Racine's rhymed alexandrines (hexameters) the English mode of rhymed iambic pentameters, a verse form particularly well suited to the highly charged urgency of Racine's drama and the coiled strength of his verse.

Complementing the translations are the illuminating Discussions and the extensive Notes and Commentaries Argent has furnished for each play. The Discussions are not offered as definitive interpretations of these plays, but are intended to stimulate readers to form their own views and to explore further the inexhaustibly rich world of Racine's plays. Included in the Notes and Commentary section of this translation are passages that Racine deleted after the first edition and have never before appeared in English.

The full title of Racine's first tragedy is La Thebaide ou les Freres ennemis (The Saga of Thebes, or The Enemy Brothers). But Racine was far less concerned with recounting the struggle for Thebes than in examining those indomitable passions--in this case, hatred--that were to prove his lifelong focus of interest. For Oedipus's sons, Eteocles and Polynices (the titular brothers), vying for the throne is rather a symptom than a cause of their unquenchable hatred--so unquenchable that by the end of the play it has not only destroyed these twin brothers, but has also claimed the lives of their mother, their sister, their uncle, and their two cousins as collateral damage. Indeed, as Racine acknowledges in his preface, "There is hardly a character in it who does not die at the end."