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This book sheds light on the career of Samuel Prideaux Tregelles, and in doing so touches on numerous aspects of nineteenth-century British and European religious history. Several recent scholars have celebrated the 200th anniversary of the German textual critic Tischendorf but Tregelles, his contemporary English rival, has been neglected, despite his achievements being comparable. In addition to his decisive contribution to Biblical textual scholarship, this study of Tregelles' career sheds light on developments among Quakers in the period, and Tregelles's enthusiastic involvement with the early nineteenth-century Welsh literary renaissance usefully supplements recent studies on Iolo Morganwg. The early career of Tregelles also gives valuable fresh detail to the origins of the Plymouth Brethren, (in both England and Italy) the study of whose early history has become more extensive over the last twenty years. The whole of Tregelles's career therefore illuminates neglected aspectsof Victorian religious life.
List of contents
1. A Falmouth Childhood.- 2. A Welsh Interlude.- 3. A Significant Change.- 4. Brethren in Plymouth and Wales.- 5. Textual Criticism and its importance for SPT: A Necessary Digression.- 6. Roman Frustrations and European Research.- 7. An Embarrassed advocate of Brethren in Italy.- 8. Tregelles and Roman Catholicism.- 9. Tregelles and Scripture.- 10. SPT and Tischendorf.- 11. Recognition, Controversy and Crisis (1850-61).- 12. The Later Years.- 13. A Muted Finale.- 14. Epilogue.
About the author
Timothy C. F. Stunt is an independent scholar, whose study of radical evangelicals in
From Awakening to Secession (2000) was the basis for his PhD awarded by Cambridge University.
Report
"Ultimately this is more a biography than a full-blown study of Tregelles's thought: Stunt is interested more in the broad sweep than the technical minutiae of his subject's work. ...he does explain its dimensions in ways that will be useful to non-expert readers. What he has done is to lay out the life of a man fairly prominent in his own day whose life and labors have been occluded ... . In that sense, Stunt has succeeded." (Gareth Atkins, Church History, Vol. 93 (1), March, 2024)
"This neat, compact, enthusiastic biography surveys the life and work of Cornish auto-didact and pioneering biblical scholar Samuel Prideaux Tregelles ... . This work should appeal to specialists in the field of nineteenth-century biblical scholarship." (R. J. W. Mills, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Vol. 72 (1), January, 2021)
"Stunt's book will be welcome to any reader with an interest in the history of the Plymouth Brethren or New Testament textual criticism as well as the Risorgimento, and certainly belongs in the libraries of universities, theology departments and seminaries. ... Stunt 'the last of the gentlemen scholars', a characterisation much in evidence in this book which illuminates the life and work of one of the nineteenth-century's pivotal scholars who deserves a far greater renown than historians generally accord him." (T J Marinello, European Journal of Theology, Vol. 30 (1), 2021)
